[gst-devel] Proposal for XML Description File for Plugins

[Darren Blaser]

Thunderbird crashed on me while spell checking a longer version of this. 
Anyway here's the short version:

I noticed this project was defined on 
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/tasks/gstreamer.html.

The only item that might be nice for you to have further clarification 
on IMHO is what are folks goals and expectations for this little project.
1) Who is the target audience for the element status table(s) you are 
creating, other developers or end users?
2) And what exactly do folks hope it will be used for? PR(look what we 
support)? developer education (look at this nice table view of all our 
elements and how they fit together)? A totem user finding a missing 
plugin is the only explicit comment I recall in this area and that came 
from the page listed above.

It would be nice for you to know what goals or objectives people might 
have in mind for this. My personal take is that it's main use would be 
as a technical PR and education piece targeted at developers and 
technical media product evaluators to highlight the list of stuff 
gstreamer supports.

3) This is minor and a bit of an aside, but should this project be 
considered an end unto itself or a stepping stone on the path to an 
improved error handling mechanism in gstreamer itself? It seems to me 
that if one of the goals of this is for this to be a stop gap solution 
of sorts for totem users and the like to go find missing plugins and the 
like, it would be MUCH better to have totem just say directly to the 
user you are missing plugin x, go to y to download and install what you 
need... I had a random thought that perhaps this status table could be a 
way to collect, update and get a working maintenance process around some 
of data you might need to improve gstreamers error handling for these 
error cases...

With an understanding of folks goals and usage expectations I'd just 
build a starting list of data items from the few items that have been 
mentioned here on the list and in the project definition page (above). 
Then ask one of the existing developers already in the know (or post to 
this list) to find out which items you might have a prayer of extracting 
from existing source. Then I'd get busy with a first pass at a prototype 
script that would grab some data and build a table which could be 
reviewed to collect feedback on and start the feature refinement 
process. I'm a big believer in first understanding expectations, then 
releasing early and releasing often...

Best Regards,

Darren

PS. Wow even the short version ended up rather long...   I must be a 
windbag of sorts.   ;-)