Gnome-2.6, GStreamer-0.8 and caps [was: Re: [gst-devel] more caps]

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2003-12-25 at 09:56, Benjamin Otte wrote:

> I always work on the branch that is the future and not a dead end. I'm not
> even really interested in backporting fixes. So if you do this, you'll
> probably lose me as a developer on the Gnome 2.6 stuff.
> Branching is never a good solution - it's just like forking, without that
> bad name. 

Nah - it's a branch if stuff is being actively merged both ways.  It's a
fork if not.

> We still have 2 months time to make all this work. 2 months ago we did
> have neither navigation nor interfaces nor tags.

No...GStreamer doesn't exist in isolation.  If stuff only starts working
in 2 months, then all the app writers who also want to get their
applications in GNOME are going to be screwed, since they won't have a
stable base to build on.

It's worth noting that the API freeze passed more than two weeks ago. 
Technically GStreamer is in the desktop, not the platform, so it doesn't
apply.  But still.

Now we all agree Dave has done some good work.  And he spent some time
yesterday getting Rhythmbox's playback pipeline to work again (mostly).
I appreciate that a lot. But metadata loading still doesn't work.  

And there's still tons of other work we have to do like getting length
metadata, and fixing all the bugs that are sure to come up with people's
corrupted and crappy MP3s.

And that's just for Rhythmbox (my primary area of concern).

At the moment, I am willing to give Dave the benefit of the doubt.  But
if we can't get things working again fairly well in the next 5 days or
so (and I am willing to give it a damn good try!), we should think
seriously about reverting back, as much as that would suck.

> After every huge merge there's huge breakage. Noone can make a branch
> work perfectly on his own. 

Perfectly?  No...but verifying that major applications work would be a
good indicator of whether a branch is mergeable.

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