[gst-devel] parsing problems

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi gang,

I'm getting increasingly confused and annoyed by the problems we're 
currently experiencing in HEAD wrt pipeline parsing.

A simple gst-launch filesrc ! fakesink is running infinite loops without 
ever getting started.

I've been told this is due to bison.

Firstly, I must honestly say I've never ran into bugs with the old parsing 
syntax.  Company said there was something wrong with it, did a lot of work 
(for which we of course thank you), then came up with something new that 
has a different syntax which we probably don't fully get yet - but it is 
irritating that we have to force a change.

What's worse though is that apparently it does not work with my very 
recent rh9-included bison.

So something is wrong, and I don't understand what it is.

I see two options:
- we revert back to the old parsing grammar, which I don't know what was 
wrong with, but worked fine
- somebody does the work to properly make our new parsing stuff work on
  reasonably standard bison versions (I count rh8's and rh9's bison
  as "standard", and you all are welcome to declare some debian and
  other distro versions as standard).

Basically I'm saying that we shouldn't start enforcing people to upgrade 
standard old development tools when chances are part of the problem is 
ours and it can be fixed more elegantly.

Also, this really tells us that we should work at getting some osort of 
regression testing going, because this is the sort of thing we really need 
to avoid.  If the simplest of pipelines fails, we probably cannot begin to 
assess what else might go wrong.

So, Leif, where you at ? :) Let's get together and set up a test suite.

Thomas

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