[gst-devel] problems ?

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

You know,

when Christian urged us all for a freeze for Gnome 2.2, I didn't expect 
stuff to happen like this.

While I know there are bugs, and I really appreciate Erik doing some code 
again (yay !), nobody sent ANY disapproval mail to Christian's freeze 
mail, but people keep on committing to various bits of the code.

What's worse, part of the commits do not explain what gets fixed in a way 
that Christian and I can test, are totally obtuse, and touch very critical 
parts of the code.

The past has shown us that just about EVERY TIME this happened, we made a
very stupid mistake in the actual release and embarassed ourselves madly.
I'd be foolish to doubt any of your ability to code, which easily
surpasses mine.  I only have doubts about you knowing every little
consequence of the changes you make.  GStreamer is still pretty fragile
and we don't really have a clean design to which we can test our
implementation, so even bug fixes in schedulers that probably do stuff in
the theoretically "right" way might break just about every app that
silently worked around the error that just got fixed.  Given the fact that
most people here don't really run apps that are built on gst now, this is
a problem.

This time, chances on embarassment and the result of it are much bigger.  
Gnome 2.2 is going out the door in a week.  It is safe to say that this 
means GStreamer will be more widely used than ever before.  And it doesn't 
stop there.  In a month or two/three, it'll be in Red Hat.  Even wider 
usage.

So, is four days after Christian and I ask for a feature freeze, and about 
two or three days before we're supposed to make a release, really the 
best time to make four patches in a row to the basic scheduler, which is 
still the default one we'll use ? Does that really leave us enough time to 
test ? Did they fix anything that was critically wrong ?

I hope so.  But I don't know.  I can't judge.

And since I can't judge things like this, and we're not doing anything in 
the way we're used to during past releases, and I really don't know what 
the effect will be, I think I'll pass on doing the release this time.
It's just not under my or Christian's control at all, and I don't think I 
could do a good job at ensuring that the release is of a higher standard 
than the previous one, as it has been before.

So - who is willing to go through all the testing and checking of cvs 
commits and patches, so that a release can be made no later than saturday 
?

Good luck,

Thomas

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