[gst-devel] where is library gst.h?

[foser]

On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 14:54 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > Gentoo eg only has gst-inspect-0.8, no gst-inspect symlink made here by
> > default :-)
> 
> Yes, Gentoo sadly does not package the unversioned binaries, making it
> more confusing for the users that read our documentation.

What documentation exactly, 'man gst-inspect' ? I think a note in the
documentation about the gstreamer versioning scheme and how that affects
the tools -primarily targeted at developers anyway- would help a great
deal in clearing up possible confusion.

Packaging is only part of the reason I did not enable this 'feature'.
Note that the gstreamer package as it is is also rather inconsistent in
applying it, see the initial example and the -broken- tools in
gst-plugins. Sure, there are complicated schemes with different
versions, sets of packages & order of install that could cause serious
headaches on systems, especially with the uncertainty about future
directions versioning-wise of gstreamer. That was not the primary
concern.

Mainly I was and am worried about the confusion unversioned binaries
might create in a versioned environment. Behaviour is fairly
unpredictable to user less knowledgeable. eg. I could imagine people
using the unversioned binaries in scripts or tools and suddenly find out
that for some unknown reason it all doesn't work anymore, because some
pipeline or flag only worked with 0.8 & not with the just installed
1.0 . Trying to dumb-away the fact that gstreamer is versioned is not
going to help anyone deal with problems. I consider it bad behaviour if
two separate packages interfere with each other, which is basically what
happens. IIRC I was not the only packager with that concern. I think
gnome might even have some (unwritten?) policy about different API
versions being strictly separated. I personally think the decision to
add the unversioned binaries was wrong and that the pro's do not
outweigh the con's, it's trading predictability for documentation
purposes.

Versioning got introduced for a good reason, why repeat the mistakes it
meant to solve?

- foser
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