[gst-devel] new API for applications to check plugin requirements

[Tim Müller]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 21:06 -0700, David Schleef wrote:

> > I'd like to add the following four functions to the 0.9 API to make it
> > easier for applications to check plugin requirements at runtime/on
> > startup:
> 
> Absolutely not.  That API is gross.

Well, got any better suggestions then?


> IMO, this kind of function does not belong in gstreamer, it belongs
> in your application.  Or at best, it's a utility function that
> should go in gstutil.c.  

This is stuff that potentially every GStreamer application needs. Just
checking the core version is not sufficient. I can see why you don't
like it and I'm not exactly proud of it either, but it's equally silly
to copy'n'paste code like that between applications if it can just as
well go into the core (last time I checked, GStreamer was still a
library targeted to be used by applications).


> Note however, that plugin versions are
> char * -- i.e., GStreamer does not care what it contains.

In that case the parsing code will just return FALSE. Tough luck. Our
plugins all come with decent version strings, and we can put a comment
into the docs about how version strings should look like (or make plugin
versions numeric of course).

Cheers
 -Tim