[gst-devel] GStreamer status, 20 Sept 2005

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi,


> You are majorly confusing development software with stable software. 


I'm not.  There are two problems with Totem.

a) the Totem that ends up in user's hands is always a totem that is
pretty much unsupported by its developers.  Its developers reply saying
"I am already working on this new cool version, you will be able to run
it in the next release of your favourite distro".  This pattern repeats
itself all the time.  Meanwhile, the totem that, for example, you can
install on FC4, still has some issues that don't get resolved by anyone.

b) the Totem that is currently being developed only ever gets tested by
a handful of developers and some brave jhbuild souls.  This totem indeed
has bug fixes, but also new features, and can only be run by people who
take very great effort into building latest CVS of everything.  It is
impossible to package this new version of totem for wider testing by
users that would love to provide bug reports about any feature you're
currently working on *when* you're working on it.


> Do
> you think gtk 2.8 works with glib 1.2?
> 

The comparison is silly - gtk is a mature library that doesn't get half
of its internals rewritten every release cycle.  Instead, it focuses on
fixing actual bugs in its API, plus providing new API.  Hence it has
less need for the user testing we do.  In fact, the two times where it
did do major changes (going to 2.0, and now with the Cairo changes),
there were a *lot* of complaints that a switch was being made without
decent user testing, that there was no group of users testing this from
an install of packages, and that there was basically no way of ensuring
this would actually work, and it would be to late to go back when this
would show to be a problem.

Both those cases point out that there is a lot of potential benefit from
getting user feedback from a group that is not as hard-core as a random
developer, but is interested enough in seeing GStreamer - or, finally,
SOME multimedia solution - succeed to do stuff.


> Think!


No need to be patronizing Ronald :) You look a lot sexier if you don't
try to.

Thomas


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