[gst-devel] stable branch

[Erik Walthinsen]

On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Benjamin Otte wrote:

> 1) All the little bugfixes I did everywhere and included in 0.7, shall I
> diff them all and include the diffs in a bugreport on bugzilla and wait
> for someone to apply them or am I allowed to apply them myself and you
> throw them out again if they have issues?
Any changes should be diffed, separated to whatever extent makes some
logical sense (i.e. file separate bugs for core and plugins, one bug for
cosmetic changes, another for each major change, etc), and filed as bugs
against 0.6 with a target of 0.6.1.  Setting the target will have to be
done by someone with the ability to do so.

> 2) What does API compatibility mean wrt to plugins?
We'll have to define that in more detail, but in at this point if it works
for all known programs using it at this point, it's 'compatible' <g>

> 2a) People wanted to include the new alsa plugin and throw out the old
> one. Is this ok?
As long as either a) no one is using the alsa plugin right now, or b) it
looks the same as the old one, interface-wise.

> 2b) How about adding new plugins? Do they need to be stable somehow or
> will we even add "not-so-good" plugins? Because newly added plugins tend
> to have issues and we get lots of bug reports and "you suck" messages if
> plugins have issues.
> I'd prefer to disable them by default but include them in the tarball.
That may be the best option.  We should consider the stable branches
mostly as bugfix-only, which means if a plugin becomes stable during the
series we should probably re-enable it.  But a new plugin shouldn't be
enabled by default until a later release, after it's proven itself.

> 2c) Changing properties of plugins is probably API breakage, right?
> Cdparanoia supports a "diskid" property which cannot be made to work
> correctly. What is the correct thing to do there?
We need to define what the plugin API is as visible to the application,
and specify levels of support.  For something like cdparanoia, I'd
classify it as maybe 2nd tier, and so I think we may want to tag various
aspects of the 'API' as stable and others as not.  This would have to be
part of the official documentation, and kept up.

/me dreams of a dedicated documentation manager

      Erik Walthinsen <omega at temple-baptist.com> - System Administrator
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