[gst-devel] fractions

[Benjamin Otte]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:

> This same thing applies to my multichannel patch as well, btw. How do we
> handle this (both in this specific case and in the general case)? I know
> it was broken before as well, so that's no reason to not apply the
> patch, but is there a general solution for this? E.g. a
> gst_structure_copy_with_new_mimetype() or something similar (I'm sure
> you get the idea)?
>
Adding a property to a caps in a stable release means this:
1) The property is optional
2) Every old element must accept ANY of the values of the new property and
do the right thing for all of this AUTOMATICALLY or we have a caps
breakage
3) fixation must work with this

This basically means that adding properties to caps during a stable
release is a no-no if you don't want API breakage.
But since the set of released GStreamer libraries has incompatible caps
(gst-ffmpeg 0.8.0 uses different caps than gst-plugins 0.8.2), and noone
cared, I don't think it's a big real-world issue.

Benjamin