[gst-devel] autoplugging and 0.9

[Benjamin Otte]

Hi gang,

As most of you know, I'm currently in the process of writing a new
autoplugger for GStreamer.
Today is the day where I've given up doing this with the current GStreamer
version. It is just not possible given the current way caps work. I'm
pretty sure this requires quite some core changes to make it possible and
since I'm not interested in thinking about 100% backwards compatibility,
I'll just give it up.
The best way to write an autoplugger with the current system is pretty
much the same it has been since spider: based on the result of the getcaps
function when a pad is added. And since spider does that already, I see no
need to change it.

If you're convinced you can write a significantly better autoplugger with
the current core, or are particularly interested in why it doesn't work
right now, feel free to checkout gst-sandbox/gst-autoplug and try to
improve it or ask me questions about it.

Since writing an autoplugger was the last task I wanted to accomplish
before starting to hack on the next unstable branch and that task is done
now - this task included tag writing and quite some more stuff, I'll
probably soon start the next unstable branch. I'm not yet sure what the
best way to do that would be (if I'll use arch or just branch cvs) and if
this will result in 0.9, just be a testing ground or can be merged back
into 0.8.

The changes I'm going to do include (in no particular order):
- getting rid of the current scheduling model
- thread safety
- changing the caps and nego system to allow autoplugging
- make the registry work
- get rid of libxml requirements
- clean up cruft
- organize headers into plugins, application and probably other categories
- use glib 2.4 features (maybe even 2.5) and get rid of stuff like atomic
code


Benjamin