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

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi Darren,

good comments actually. I agree the task isn't clear on this.

On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 08:34, Darren Blaser wrote:
> 1) Who is the target audience for the element status table(s) you are 
> creating, other developers or end users?

Users. We (or at least I) get many questions on which element or
dependency is required for $function, which is what I hope to solve by
doing this. It'd also solve questions from users on 'why can't I seek in
my raw MPEG-2 video or MPEG-4 AAC ADTS file'.

> 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.

A link in totem to this page would be very useful. Obviously, PR and
developer support is a nice extra.

> 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...

I don't think we can do that, it goes in right again the dynamic
plugging capability of GStreamer. We don't know what decodes $mediatype,
because that depends on the plugins the user has installed. Multiple
plugins can decode a given mediatype, and so on. Not to mention that
Fedora and the like may even strip out the useful parts (prticularly
mpeg) if we do this inside totem, making it completely useless for our
intended purpose.

As for Jeff, I'm happy he's willing to do this. I think Benjamin's reply
elsewhere in this thread was very useful, I may comment on that later.

Ronald

-- 
Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>