[gst-devel] Re: ranks (was: Re: [gst-cvs] tpm gst-plugins-good: gst-plugins-good/ gst-plugins-good/ext/cdio/)

[Benjamin Otte]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, David Schleef wrote:

> I also agree with
> Uraeus that the app maintainers should have the most say in this
> decision.
>
Has anyone ever thought about a good way to automatically determine an
order for elements? I guess in the future when there might be multiple
elements that implement a particular feature, there will be quite some
interest in using the right plugin. And each of them trying to provide a
higher rank than the others doesn't sound like something we want to aim
at. (I can imagine Sun mp3 vs Fluendo mp3 vs mad for example, where the
preference might depend on which one was installed last or which one has
the higher version or even which one sounds better to a particular user.)
And it gets especially interesting now that Fluendo "duplicates" quite a
lot of existing but nondistributable plugins.

I don't think it's a good idea to make it depend on application developers
in the long run, because I can easily imagine them disagreeing.

I'd prefer something that works as automatic as possible but I have no
clue about how to do that even though I've thought about it for a while.

Benjamin