Hi all, I have a suggestion for improving the FFmpeg website. I really like the way the current "About FFmpeg" webpage presents FFmpeg - the very first sentence is amazingly true. A few months back I thought this was just a PR push, but the proof of this lies in the variety of ways FFmpeg is used and its flexibility compared to anything else I know of.
Furthermore, it is honest and balanced - security issues are always there and it gives an accurate description of why. Anyway, I feel it can be improved by adding a sentence or two somewhere regarding portability. Just have a look at fate.ffmpeg.org - it compiles, runs, and passes fate on Linux, Mac OS, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc under a wide array of compilers, libraries, etc. It is definitely a lot of work writing portable code across such platforms, and I have appreciated this first hand with some recent work that I have done. How many projects out there are this good in terms of portability? I estimate that a significant fraction of e.g GitHub projects are Linux/Mac OS X specific - many will fail even on a POSIX platform, let alone Windows. This is part of the general trap I have noticed of the incorrect "POSIX == Linux". Then you have cases like systemd, which don't even bother - Linux is their only platform, and even there they have quite restrictive kernel/libc dependencies. Thus, FFmpeg can rightfully be proud of this accomplishment, and IMHO should mention it publicly on the page. I can help/submit patches regarding wording if others agree with this. Regarding the large array of platforms, as can be seen from the patches I have submitted over the past few weeks, one long term goal I have is getting to a "nearly -Werror" state at least on the most recent clang/gcc. Already notice that most warnings are from older compilers, non clang/gcc, windows, etc, which in many cases give us nothing (since newer ones anyway warn for the good ones). Nevertheless, these are occasionally useful. Latest clang/gcc are on the order of 100 warnings, and I think with some more work, this can be brought down to 10 (for the most annoying ones). If this happens, it should help us in treating warnings on latest clang/gcc more seriously than before. Among these two, I have been far more impressed with clang than gcc. This might stir the flames, but who knows: maybe in a year we can seriously consider -Werror for a certain set of "core platforms" (which can be voted upon; recall the leadership committee etc). By a "platform" I mean a complete environment: set of configure flags, compiler flags, compiler versions, etc. Regards, Ganesh _______________________________________________ ffmpeg-devel mailing list ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel
