Hi everyone 2 days ago "tests/checkasm: switch to shared libcheckasm implementation #22546" was opened
This is not a small refactor. It adds 651 commits, touches 117 files, and adds
19405 lines and removes 1940.
That scope merits broader review and discussion before any merge decision.
I have several concerns.
First, a dependancy on external infrastructure is unnecceasry
Second, a dependancy on gitlab-CI is not acceptable
We need to be able to run the full relevant test coverage ourselves, under
FFmpeg-controlled infrastructure
Third, the copyright and authorship situation needs clarification.
The copyrights after the PR
git grep Copyright tests/checkasm/ | sed 's/.*:[ *;#]*//' | sed
's/([cC])/©/' | sed 's/,//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -10
3 Copyright © 2024 Marvin Scholz
4 Copyright © 2015 James Almer
4 Copyright © 2015 Janne Grunau
4 Copyright © 2023 Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences
(ISCAS).
5 Copyright © 2025 Martin Storsjo
6 Copyright © 2016 Alexandra Hájková
8 Copyright © 2015 Henrik Gramner
37 Copyright © 2018 Two Orioles, LLC
45 Copyright © 2018 VideoLAN and dav1d authors
45 Copyright © 2025 Niklas Haas
But the actual authorship in tests/checkasm/ is dominated by FFmpeg
contributors, for example:
git shortlog -s -n tests/checkasm/ | head -10
120 Andreas Rheinhardt
87 James Almer
80 Martin Storsjö
44 Rémi Denis-Courmont
29 Henrik Gramner
28 Michael Niedermayer
27 Niklas Haas
23 Clément Bœsch
18 Hendrik Leppkes
18 Martin Vignali
the authorship in the added commits is likewise specific and attributable:
git shortlog -s -n origin..
450 Niklas Haas
128 Martin Storsjö
25 Rémi Denis-Courmont
22 Cameron Cawley
11 Marvin Scholz
6 Nathan E. Egge
3 KO Myung-Hun
2 J. Dekker
1 Brad Smith
1 Felix Paul Kühne
1 Henrik Gramner
1 Konstantin Pavlov
So at least from a first look, this appears to remove or dilute FFmpeg
attribution
while adding blanket notices such as “VideoLAN and dav1d authors” to many
files,
even though that is not a literal commit author. That needs a proper
explanation before anything proceeds.
Forth,
"Some changes have been ported over from FFmpeg's copy of checkasm, with
permission to relicense."
My permission for relicensing was conditional on the resulting project
being hosted on code.ffmpeg.org.
That condition was never fulfilled. So unless I am missing something, that
statement is at best
incomplete and may be misleading.
Fifth,
the libcheckasm work was done by FFlabs people and discussed in FFlabs
meetings.
So unless I misunderstand the situation, we seem to have funded work that
now removes FFmpeg attribution or identity,
adds a dependency on external infrastructure, and moves testing in a
direction tied to systems FFmpeg does not control and previously did not choose.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but from where I stand this proposal raises
significant technical,
governance, infrastructure, and attribution concerns, and I do not think it
should be merged in its current form.
thx
--
Michael GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB
Complexity theory is the science of finding the exact solution to an
approximation. Benchmarking OTOH is finding an approximation of the exact
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