[gst-devel] cvs use

[Julien MOUTTE]

Folks,

I ve been reading those mails again and again and thinking about all
that stuff during my sandwich break today.

Well i think that, as usual, everybody has some good points and some bad
ones.

Good points :

- GStreamer indeed lacks some features and those features can't be
implemented without serious reengineering of the core and plugins.
(Benjamin was talking about SMP, repluggin. I would add interactivity,
smart video software scaling, QOS, etc..)
- GStreamer is a library and a growing number of apps are linking to
that library. Most of them need to work against HEAD AND BRANCH-0_6.
Breaking the library for some days without a clear discussion about the
why and how on the mailing list is clearly breaking everyone's
productivity and motivation aswell as applications for some weeks
usually.
- When code builds that does not mean that it works. The only way to
realize that some things are not working is to use them or develop with
them.

Bad points :

- The HEAD branch is not a war field. I m really sorry for those who
consider HEAD a play ground but most of us are updating daily their HEAD
repository and we need something that at least builds. I don't really
care if spider is not working as long as i can continue working on my
ximagesink plugin during it's getting fixed. One thing that drives a
developer really sad is to be blocked because of big HEAD breakage that
he can't fix quickly.
- Branching does not mean sending some code in a dead end way. Normal
use of branches in our case would be :
  a) Branch HEAD.
  b) Break everything for a big architectural change.
  c) Fix all the stuff in the Branch.
  d) Merge it back.

To conclude i would say that major breakage for structural changes of
the core and plugins should happen in a BRANCH and get discussed a lot
on the mailing list. HEAD does not guarantee that API/ABI is stable but
it's at least partly working and let you work with it (i mean as a
developer here not as a user). So that might break applications from
time to time and that's normal, but that should not break the whole
library (BUILD and RUN) because that would mean the code was not ready
for being committed.

My 2 cents.

-- 
Julien MOUTTE (aka Dolphy)

Homepage : http://dolphy-tech.net
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