[gst-devel] [RFC] Moving away from 'common'

[Felipe Contreras]

Hi,

I'm tired of "Automatic update of common submodule". Of the last 10
commits in gst-openmax only 2 have been real commits. This is high
volume noise.

Imagine a truly modular system like Xorg, where modules in-tree
(xf86-video-ati) don't have any extra rights than modules out-of-tree
(xf86-video-avivo). There are many advantages but one of the main ones
is that new development is easy, and moving new modules to in-tree is
much easier.

Is GStreamer that modular? Well, I can already see a difference;
in-tree modules will get automatic common submodule updates, while
out-of-tree wouldn't. I've suggested previously to remove this
automatic update but nobody found my arguments compelling.

So I'm taking the next step which is to question if gst 'common' makes
any sense at all. For starters the name 'common' suggests that all
GStreamer submodules *must* have all that stuff, but that is not true.
In gst-openmax for example I doubt I'm using even 10% of 'common', and
how many modules really make use of gst-x11.m4 anyway?

So, just like gnome-common, and xorg-util, I'm suggesting we create a
gst-util package that is installed just like any other package so we
get rid of git submodules.

This move would probably be a bit big so it might make sense to do it
step by step. Here's a little something to begin with:
http://github.com/felipec/gst-util

Thoughts?

-- 
Felipe Contreras