[gst-devel] state of the gang

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi Thomas,

euh... That was a looooooooooong email. You forgot one section:
documentation. I'd like to urge everyone (including myself) to write
documentation on the APIs they create. What does each function do, when
should it be called (and when not), etc. This includes gtk-doc style
comments for each public function. I'd also love some small example
applications for application APIs. Think
gst-plugins/example/gstplay/player.c for libgstplay style. It's small,
does one thing and does it well. I'd like to see similar examples for
tagging, capsnego, mixer, xoverlay (well, maybe gst-sandbox/gst-overlay/
suffices, not sure), etc.

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 16:51, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> Thirdly, we will have to make our source more manageable.  The plugins
> really are getting too big.  Each time I bring that up, with ideas on
> how to go about splitting things,  I get a backlash from other people. 
> However, it is also clear that those people really don't spend much time
> on making sure that their commits don't accidentally break the build.
> Quite a few recent commits were obvious build breakers, indicating the
> commiter either didn't realize this was affecting the build or didn't
> test at all anyway.

You win, go ahead. ;).

> Furthermore, a recent comment by Havoc on a GNOME list saying that
> "gnome obviously cannot host mp3 decoding code at all" made me realize
> that gst-plugins as currently distributed is not what can go in into
> GNOME 2.6 *at all*.  Whether we like it or not, it is not acceptable to
> put ffmpeg in any code form on gnome servers and get it distributed. 
> You can get mad (pun intended) about that in general, but it's a real
> problem that needs to be solved before 0.8

Havoc is speaking as employee of RedHat, inc. Their standpoint is very
clear on this, and I respect that. That doesn't mean that I agree. ;).
I'd like to see opinions from other people on this, too, also non-RedHat
people.

I don't agree. I think it's perfectly fine for Gnome to ship this code.
Now, surely, I'm not a lawyer, neither do I know anything from laws
[blablabla...], but I do know that it's perfectly legal to ship mp3,
mpeg-2, mpeg-4 or any such patented codec __in source__. The binaries
are what make them illegal. Read the MPEG LA licenses if you want. Gnome
only hosts source, so I don't see any issue, unless Gnome suddenly
decided that they want to host binaries. If so, I'm willing to revise my
point of view.

Now, of course, that doesn't mean that I'm in favour of promoting
patented crap such as MPEG video/audio or ASF. But I do think we should
support them, because that's what people expect us to do. And they
expect the same from the Gnome video player or whichever cool
application that's shipped by Gnome. If we don't, they'll say we suck,
which is even worse than shipping patented stuff, imo.

Feel free to raise points against me, I haven't taken a final decision
yet.

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer