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

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi,

> > 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' ? 

The manual ? Articles that get written ? FAQ ?

Also, things we say to help out people in our IRC channel ? You know how
IRC is - it's hard enough to get people to try out stuff and stick to
what you're saying, having yet another hurdle for figuring out what they
should be doing is *really* annoying.

> 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.

Could definately be added - but the main entry point is still the
unversioned binaries and I've always made sure our docs are in sync with
that.

> 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

Please point out these inconsistencies so they can be fixed.  Bugs
shouldn't be disguised as features, but fixed.

What is the initial example you mention ?

>  and the -broken- tools in
> gst-plugins.

What broken tools ? Be more explicit please ?

>  Sure, there are complicated schemes with different
> versions, sets of packages & order of install that could cause serious
> headaches on systems,

I don't see the complication.  It works fine on other platforms.  Zaheer
tells me there's no reason why it would be difficult on Gentoo.

>  especially with the uncertainty about future
> directions versioning-wise of gstreamer.

What uncertainty is there ? If there are questions, ask them.  The
system was put in place precisely to make it more clear.

> 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.

Since we are the people dealing with these problems, it's really
annoying to have some platform behave differently *just because the
package maintainer can*.  I'm saying this with my package maintainer hat
on - I also maintain stuff.  If I disagree with some upstream project, I
try to resolve it with that project, and I prefer doing it their way,
not my way - precisely to be more  consistent in behaviour over
different distros.

My personal belief is that a package maintainer should have a *very good
reason* to knowingly work against what the upstream project recommends
or is asking for packages.

>  I consider it bad behaviour if
> two separate packages interfere with each other, which is basically what
> happens.

"interfere" is a little vague here, isn't it ? I sure hope your
gdk-pixbuf package is registering new capabilities after installing png.

>  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.

There's a lot of thinking going on :) FWIW, I haven't seen people
complain about how things are packaged on Fedora.  Is there really no
way I can convince you to just please follow our recommendations,
realizing that it's just nicer to have things be similar across
systems ? If every package maintainer lets his personal feelings
overrule the project's wishes, it just means that it works differently
on every system.  And you still can do what you personally want - just
don't install that tools package.

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

Another vagary.  Are you sure you know the reason why it got introduced,
what it meant to solve ? Are you sure it's repeating these mistakes you
might be thinking of ?

Thomas

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