[gst-devel] GStreamer status, 20 Sept 2005

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 20:17 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> 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.

You can still install newer versions of Totem on FC4. The 1.0 branch
won't require any additional dependencies, the 1.2 branch will require
iso-codes (for the menu language, RPMs available), and a newer D-Bus
(for the Mozilla plugin, rebuild the current rawhide D-Bus RPMs and
there you go).

And I never reply that a particular bug has been fixed in the unstable
version unless it would be impossible to backport the fixes to the
stable version. Ancient versions (prior to 1.0), with backtraces with no
debugging symbols will get that treatment.

You can also ask for a newer version of the same branch to your
distribution maintainer...

> 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.

Impossible to package for what? For FC3? Yeah, it's hard to package for
FC3, but the switch to GTK+ 2.6 was necessary to take advantage of new
features available to us.

The 1.0 branch is still supported, and I very often backport fixes from
the HEAD branch for distributions that don't want to package the
unstable (but now considered stable) version of Totem. And I got a lot
of bug reports from Ubuntu, Mandrake Cooker and Fedora Rawhide users.

Saying that you require CVS version of everything is a load of BS. And
so you know, I'll probably be pushing the HEAD branch of Totem to use
GTK+ 2.8 when FC5 is out. The 1.0 and 1.2 branches will still work fine
on older distros.

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net>