Hi, On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:37:32 +0200, Romain Bouqueau <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I am a contributor on the GPAC multimedia project. We provide several > tools, among them a player which relies on FFmpeg/libav for decoding. > > As you know, the Debian Multimedia maintainers switched to libav for their > packages. We barely noticed until the libav API started to change. > > I've just replied to Reinhard on the Debian Multimedia mailing-lists ( > http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/2013-September/034488.html). > It appears that the libav API is not stable along the 'release/9' branch. > Is it expected?
No it's certainly not expected. There should be absolutely no API or ABI changed in a release branch ever. So please provide more info so we can determine where the problem is. > > From where I stand, I have the feeling your API is evolving fast. We, at > GPAC, have a linear (no branches) and slow cycle of development. It means > that we have to support more and more versions of your API simultaneously. > In the long-term, this is not sustainable. > I'm sorry it causes trouble for you, but we don't do all the API changes because we like breaking other people's stuff. It's just that most of the original pre-2006 APIs were designed either inadequately or not at all, so changing them was necessary to allow certain features/avoid horrible hacks. Most of the original APIs have now been replaced, so the rate of changes should be getting lower from now on. Other than that, it depends on how many Libav versions you want to support. We usually follow the 'deprecate -> release -> remove' pattern, so every API is deprecated (with a replacement available) in at least one release before it is removed. Supporting two different major versions should not be all that hard then. More than that can be messy, that much is certainly true. But do you really need to support building the latest development version of your program with over two years old Libav? -- Anton Khirnov _______________________________________________ libav-api mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libav.org/mailman/listinfo/libav-api
