Plugins in separate module was ( [gst-devel] bindings)

[Christian Schaller]

On 14 Aug 2001 23:11:11 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> Would somebody care to move the lame plugin to a separate module ?
> With the module separate, it would be easier for people to provide 
> source/binary packages of it that would be add-ons to the gstreamer 
> packages that will (soon ;) show up in the distributions.
> 
> And I'm sure that lame packages would show up soon on FTP sites in 
> patent-free countries.
> 
> Or shall we start moving plugins in their own modules. I can think of a 
> DVD playing module containing ac3dec, mpeg2dec, and dvdsrc plugins.
> 
> Comments ?

Actually I discussed this with Wim the other day on IRC altough with a
slightly different angle. My suggestion was aimed at solving the problem
of us depending on some extremely API unstable libraries.

My suggestion for solving this is doing what Abiword does with some of
its dependencies like Expat or Wvware, namely add them to the source
distribution and install them into the abiword binary tree. 

So to take Bastiens DVD example, my idea would mean that we make a
separate DVD package and add the code of ac3dec unmodified to that.
When installed this package would install our version of ac3dec into
something like $prefix/share/gst/ac3dec

That what other applications needing a older/newer version of ac3dec
than our plugin would cause depdency conflicts with GStreamer when
installed.

Plugins which depends on more stable libraries (past 1.0), like our FLAC
or GNOME-VFS plugins we should not do this with.

Christian