[gst-devel] state of the herd

[David Schleef]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 04:51:14PM +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> * MAINTAINERSHIP

> There are some people who naturally maintain plugins and get annoyed
> when someone else touches them and changes everything.  People work in
> different ways, and we should ensure we can work together well without
> cramping everyone's style.

This is ok, as long as it is clear that territorialism is not allowed.
I fully intend to change any code in a plugin if it's done incorrectly.
(poorly != incorrectly)

> * CORE VS PLUGINS
> 
>  People on both sides have said that we should probably decouple a
> little more, allowing people on both sides to do their work without
> getting in each other's way.  The side benefit would be that we get to
> stabilize the interface between the two more.  What do you think ?

Probably not a good idea.  Being closely coupled makes it easier to
try new things in the core.  GStreamer is still not 1.0, so we need
to keep this flexibility.

A lot of the difficulties would go away if we had actually frozen
the core in a timely manner (My fault!).  Sticking to a timed release
schedule will help to keep major core changes to three month periods,
the next one being (March 13 - June 13).

> * CVS DECISIONS
> 
> Ronald and Julien have complained that the amount of breakage in the
> core has stalled their development too much.  They were effectively
> unable to work on gst-record and gst-player due to a broken core.

See above.  I intend to be better about this in the next release
cycle.

> We probably should have some rules of thumb for CVS
> that would include something like "don't merge a branch before going on
> a holiday".

Most of this can be written down as one rule "Don't be stupid".  But
feel free to keep a list of anecdotes of people being stupid.

> * PLUGINS

> Also, this won't work well unless the core developers send out clear
> documentation on how to fix plugins, instead of trying to fix up
> everything by themselves.

gstreamer/docs/random/ds/element-checklist

Please append.  Fixing these issues is something that anyone
can participate in.

> * RELEASES

Splitting: I'm becoming more in favor of dividing gst-plugins into
"well-maintained libraries" and "poorly-maintained libraries", or
something similar.  However, we would annoy the crap out of packagers
if we randomly move stuff between gst-plugins1 and gst-plugins2.

> 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

I agree with Ronald on this.



dave...