[gst-devel] plugins

[David I. Lehn]

* Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas at urgent.rug.ac.be> [20011209 05:10]:
> people seem to agree on the fact that we need to split off the plugins
> from the core in order to make the build more manageable.
> People also haven't agreed yet on a good way to split up plugins.
> 
> I think that if we're not talking about it we have no hope of an agreement
> ;)
> So we had people who wanted no subleveling at all on the one side, and
> people like me (I might even have been alone ;) ) who like deep nesting.
> 

Not all of us agree.  See my contributions to the previous discussions
on this.

The more I think about it I really don't see the need to split up
anything.  It makes it a whole lot WORSE for me.  I'm going to install
the whole thing anyway, having to deal with N source tarballs and
build/install them in order is just annoying.

So what problem are you trying to solve?  Source tree too big?  Disk
space is cheap so that's probably not true.  I bet I know what it is...
you don't want to wait for the build system to go through and build
plugins you'll never use.  Just because you had the dev libs installed
doesn't always mean you care about those plugins.  Right?

So why not fix the build system?  CML and perhaps other newer kbuild
stuff looks interesting.  Linux kernel solves the exact same issue.
Users don't want to build support for everything so they have a config
system.  They don't split things up because it would make things worse
due to dependency tracking and interface changes updating and so on.  We
could have a config file or something that lists which plugins you want
or don't want or whatever.  Perhaps some wildcard like system with
keywords if we get fancy.  Then tell the auto* tools to only build the
plugins you asked for.  Complain loudly if user selected a plugin
without having the needed prereqs.

Wouldn't this work for everyone?  Takes a few mins to pick plugins you
like, then build is just what we have now except it just does the
plugins you want.

I do think we could rearrange some of the plugin dir.  It's not very
consistent in a few places.  Like I've said eariler, I'd just as soon
see it become a flatter hierarchy.

-dave
-- 
David I. Lehn <dlehn at vt.edu>  | http://www.lehn.org/~dlehn/
Computer Engineering Graduate @ Virginia Tech in sunny Blacksburg, VA