Steven Toth wrote:

Regarding the multiproto situation:

A number of developers, maintainers and users are unhappy with the multiproto situation, actually they've been unhappy for a considerable amount of time. The linuxtv developer community (to some degree) is seen as a joke and a bunch in-fighting people. Multiproto is a great demonstration of this. [1] The multiproto project has gone too far, for too long and no longer has any credibility in the eyes of many people.

In response, a number developers have agreed that "enough is enough" and "it's time to take a new direction", for these developers the technical, political and personal cost of multiproto is too high. These developers have decided to make an announcement.

Mauro Chehab, Michael Krufky, Patrick Boettcher and myself are hereby announcing that we no longer support multiproto and are forming a smaller dedicated project group which is focusing on adding next generation S2/ISDB-T/DVB-H/DVB-T2/DVB-SH support to the kernel through a different and simpler API.

Basic patches and demo code for this API is currently available here.

http://www.steventoth.net/linux/s2

Does it even work? Yes Is this new API complete? No Is it perfect? No, we've already had feedback on structural and namingspace changes that people would like to see. Does it have bugs? Of course, we have a list of things we already know we want to fix.

but ...

Is the new approach flexible? Yes, we're moving away from passing fixed modulation structures into the kernel. Can we add to it without breaking the future ABI when unforseen modulations types occur? Yes Does it preserve backwards compatibility? Yes Importantly, is the overall direction correct? Yes Does it impact existing frontend drivers? No. What's the impact to dvb-core? Small. What's the impact to application developers? None, unless an application developer wants to support the new standards - binary compatibility!

We want feedback and we want progress, we aim to achieve it.

Importantly, this project group seeks your support.

If you also feel frustrated by the multiproto situation and agree in principle with this new approach, and the overall direction of the API changes, then we welcome you and ask you to help us.

Growing the list of supporting names by 100%, and allowing us to publish your name on the public mailing list, would show the non-maintainer development community that we recognize the problem and we're taking steps to correct the problem. We want to make LinuxTV a perfect platform for S2, ISDB-T and other advanced modulation types, without using the multiproto patches.

We're not asking you for technical help, although we'd like that :) , we're just asking for your encouragement to move away from multiproto.

If you feel that you want to support our movement then please help us by acking this email.

Regards - Steve, Mike, Patrick and Mauro.

Acked-by: Patrick Boettcher pb@linuxtv.org Acked-by: Michael Krufky mkrufky@linuxtv.org Acked-by: Steven Toth stoth@linuxtv.org Acked-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab mchehab@infradead.org

• [1]. Rather than point out the issues with multiproto here, take a

look at the patches and/or read the comments on the mailing lists.

Guys, I don't like the way you do this. ;-(

Why didn't you propose this API when we reviewed multiproto? Meanwhile there are applications (vdr, others?) which implement the multiproto API.

As I am not willing to spend a single minute of my time with API wars, I will ack this API only if the multiproto developer and the users agree with this approach.

Oliver