The library projects under this org and alternative ways for obtaining libs

[softworkz]

Hi Mathew Oliver,

In your retirement notice, you mentioned VCPKG as an alternative source for obtaining required libs.
Personally, I have some rather bad experience with VCPKG, because it is pretty invasive. After installing and enabling, it pushes its libs and includes into all VC projects you are working with. Initially, I wasn't aware of it and it caused me a hard time, figuring out why certain projects suddenly didn't compile anymore. From that experience, I'd rather avoid VCPKG.

I can understand the motivation as you sometimes get to a point in life where you need to finish up on old projects and move forward instead. Yet I'm not sure whether archiving all those repos is the best way to indicate that you don't want to maintain them any longer, because it prevents people from submitting PRs.
I think there are two very different levels of maintenance: (1) Trying to keep the dependencies always/regularly up-to-date or (2) just updating when ultimately needed in order to satisfy requirements of the latest ffmpeg versions.
(1) is a huge and time-consuming effort
(2) happens quite rarely

All you'd have to do would be to merge a PR occasionally - but that's not possible when the repos are archived...
Maybe it could also be done by just adding a note to the projects that they are no longer updated? Just wanted to know what you'd think about this...

I'd also have repos to push for libplacebo and libvpl for building compatible libs. I could publish them under my account, but it would be sad when things would get fragmented like that.

But if you really want to totally shut down on all this, another alternative might be building dependencies on MSYS2/MINGW but still with MSVC.
Another project to which I'm contributing is FFmpegInteropX and they are building dependencies like that: https://github.com/ffmpeginteropx/FFmpegInteropX/tree/master/Libs
I was able to copy the compiled libdav1d.lib and the includes to the SMP directories, ran the generator with --enable-libdav1d and it's been working just fine.

Best,
sw