[gst-devel] tags and metadata

[Benjamin Otte]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

> I thought we could have passed beyond the point of making it personal.
> First of all, you've never really given reasons for why you disliked
> nautilus-media.  Second, there are people who thought that nautilus
> should be able to play audio files.  If you're not one of those, then
> fine - I also assume that you don't really use nautilus at all.  But
> you're not a GNOME person anyway, you're a GStreamer person.
>
Ah, I'm a GStreamer person. That must be the reason why I'm a Gnome
foundation member then ;)

> Well, tough break.  You don't get to decide what goes into GNOME at
> all.  You did decide that GStreamer 0.8 was to be the platform for GNOME
> 2.6, and making that decision quite explicitly binds you to make sure
> the apps inside of GNOME using GStreamer evolve with it. Ie, the moment
> you decide "this goes into GNOME 2.6" is the moment the burden is on you
> to make sure it actually supports the featureset of 2.4 and whatever
> goes in in 2.6 on top of that.
>
Uhm no, it's not my problem if Gnome apps work. If Gnome devs think their
apps don't work with 0.8, they should say so. I just said I'd make
GStreamer 0.8 ready for Gnome 2.6 and would like people to include it in
Gnome. And then the Gnome people that decide what goes in Gnome decided
that they wanted it in. I didn't decide it all, just like you said.

> Its maintainer asked you *repeatedly* for your plans with the tagging
> stuff, waiting for you to come up with something for a long time.
>
And I always explained it, I even added support for multiple entries per
tag because of your input.

> What I don't understand is that, only two months after the API suddenly
> drops into place, and having had the stuff that n-m uses deprecated, I
> am the one who gets to find out that what you put into place doesn't
> seem to replace the stuff you deprecated completely.  That's fine too, I
> want to work on it and help fix it.  But don't pretend you didn't know
> :) You're a lot smarter than that :)  I'm pretty sure you knew all along
> that nautilus-media wouldn't work anymore this way.
>
The only thing that doesn't work is the artificial differentiation between
"streaminfo" and "metadata". I explained to you why it doesn't work.
So the thing you call a regression, I call a bug. :)

> Right now, it looks like metadata doesn't
> even work for ogg files, and the streaminfo only works for ogg files
> because I put it in.  So I'm pretty sure you're aware that there are
> regressions.
>
Uh sure, there's stuff that still needs to be implemented. I'm not
omnipotent unfortunately and can do everything at once... Vorbis metadata
extraction works via my local vorbisdec element btw, which I haven't
committed because of the float problems)

> The ONLY thing that matters today and that I care about is how I can fix
> stuff so that it works again.  I want to figure out what you intended to
> do with the functionality that was already in GStreamer in 0.6.  I want
> to figure out how you think it should be done so that nautilus-media can
> work again.  I'm willing to code up whatever is necessary for it.
>
Just don't differentiate between writable and non-writable metadata
anymore as that is not possible beyond guessing as I explained in my last
mail. Treat all tags equally.


Benjamin