[gst-devel] going into gnome 2.2

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hey gang,

it looks fairly certain that GStreamer is going into gnome 2.2, which I 
think is great.

We have some things we need to take care of to achieve that however, and I
want to start the ball rolling.

Here's (off the top of my head) some things we still need to do :

a) version our library using proper libtool versioning
b) name our library as libgstreamer-(major).(minor).so
c) name our include locations as gstreamer-(major).(minor)/gst,
   and put ALL of them (even for helper libs) into those dirs
d) have plug-ins have a symbol that defines against which major-minor
   core they are compiled, and check that
e) make plug-ins have it's own version number that reflects the status
   of the plug-in itself - right now plugins actually compile in the
   core version number, which is pretty pointless anyway.
f) move the registry to /var/cache instead of in /etc (it's a cache,
   not a config file)
g) figure out where to put a capplet that handles the gconf keys
h) pad structures for ABI compatibility requirements, something Wim said
   he was going to work on
i) decide which parts of the code are stable and which are unstable,
   and use a compile-time define to ifdef out the unstable bits

I want to get started on these issues as soon as possible, so that I can 
provide a new release for gnome testing.

I also suggest that at this point we move to 0.5.0, which would then be 
the first release to implement the above things, and have uneven minors be
development versions and 0.6.0 stable versions.  This would mean that,
when 0.6.0 is released, hopefully coinciding with gnome 2.2, we would
branch when it's needed to 0.7.0 while still working on 0.6.0.

It's pretty important that if you have questions, demands, remarks, 
whatever on this, that you make them known, because I want to make this as 
painless as possible for everyone involved if we decide to do this.

Thanks,
Thomas

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