Am 09.10.2011 00:35, schrieb Edouard Chalaron:
> I trust in the obvious, there has been so much effort put into that that the 
> idea of seeing it amputated from a major feature freaks the mickey out of 
> me.

> Since we are here : Cinelerra is like italian motorbikes, nothing beats them 
> as long as you know how to use them !


Hi Edouard,

I'll try to explain the developer's perspective a bit.

First of, thanks for expressing clearly the usability of that feature for you.
Probably, by doing so, you've saved it form being removed. Open source and the
exchange within the community rocks!

Anyway, put yourself in the position of someone participating as developer
to Cinelerra-CV. It's a huge source base. Its difficult to work with, at times.
Maintaining some features often requires a very high effort, just to get/keep
it working as obvious. And, Cinelerra-CV is lacking developer power --same as
pretty much every media handling open source application. Everyone prefers to
write yet another sticky notes applet or text editor....

Many many features in Cinelerra are written in a not sufficiently defensive
way. That means, instead of giving a useful error message, indicating what is
wrong and what would be required to get it working, they just assumed the
everything-is-fine case, and thus just crash when used differently.

Most every new user trying out Cinelerra, does the following:
- try to grab video input --> *bang*
- try to load an AVCHD clip --> *failure*
- try to get useful output for a DVD --> *endless misery*

Which causes again and again long complaints on the mailinglist, rants, flames,
numerous bug reports and so on.

Quite rightfully so. The new users tried the most obvious thing, after all.

Unfortunately, solving each of these long standing issues cleanly seems to be
way beyond the available manpower. The DVD export topic is notoriously complex.
AVCHD means either integrating a completely different media import framework
(which one?), or it means chasing a moving target (namely ffmpeg). And
reimplementing the grabbing/import feature to play well with the current
environment requires a skill set and competence which is quite disjoint to
what is required to hack and maintain the rest of cinelerra.

Since it's good advice in any difficult development project situation to
start with addressing the time suckers and morale killers, this leads to
the idea of *removing* half-way working features which can't be reasonably
improved, in order to use the scarce developer power for those mostly
working parts, which also require our constant care and love to prevent
them from bit rot.

Cheers,
Hermann V.





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