[Live-devel] How to contribute code?

[Ross Finlayson]

I don't use any revision control system myself.  When I'm developing 
this code, I use exactly two commands: "emacs" and "make".

Each source code release - in "tar.gz" form - is less than 500 kBytes 
in size.  These days, that's not a significant amount of data to 
download in order to get the latest revision, and any bandwidth 
savings obtained by downloading from a revision control system 
instead would be insignificant.  And people should not be using any 
version of the code other than the latest one, because that's all 
that we support.

I suspect that the real reason why some people want to use a revision 
control system is that they want to easily update to the latest 
version of the code after they've made custom modifications to it 
(i.e., without losing their modifications).  I'm sorry, but this is 
something that I explicitly want to discourage.  People *should not* 
be making modifications to the released "LIVE555 Streaming Media" 
code (i.e., inside the "live" directory).  Instead, they should be 
leaving that directory as it is, and instead putting their own code 
in a separate directory (using subclassing, if necessary).

If there are parts of the code that make it difficult for people to 
customize via subclassing - e.g., some class members that should be 
"protected:" instead of "private:", then please let us know.
-- 

Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/