Suppose FATE had the infrastructure to test arbitrary branches of FFmpeg. I just realized that it wouldn’t necessarily help because the FATE test specs keep changing as the code is adjusted. This implies that there needs to be more sophisticated test management.

This occurred to me due to the chatter surrounding the recent FFmpeg 0.51 security release. Running the FATE suite against 0.51 doesn’t work since the current state of the various FATE tests are contingent upon the current mainline FFmpeg source. Possible solutions going forward? Perhaps upgrade the FATE database to support some kind of versioning? However, this would also limit my ability to monkey with the existing FATE suite of samples.