GStreamer registry cache

[Cosimo Cecchi]

Hi all,

While investigating why some applications on our deployed OS were taking a
long time to start, but only the first time one among a set was started on
a clean user, we determined that GstRegistry was the cause of the delay, as
it's generated in the home directory the first time a GStreamer application
runs. (We were hitting this through a WebKit dependency, which initializes
GStreamer.)

Would it be possible to ship a static registry together with the OS (i.e.
in /usr) instead? My understanding from reading this [1] is that the
current implementation will only read from $XDG_CACHE_HOME.
Of course, when the information in the system cache is out of date (e.g.
because a new plugin was installed), another one would be generated in the
home directory and that would take precedence when reading it back.
Finally, it would be possible to add a command to update the system cache
from a process that drives the installation of a new plugin (e.g. a package
manager), similarly to how the GTK icon cache or fontconfig cache work.

I'm interested in contributing a patch to fix this, but I want to know if
this is the right approach.

[1]
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gstreamer/html/GstRegistry.html

Thanks,
Cosimo
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