Improving Internal Diagnostics?

[Stirling Westrup]

I just had to track down a pipeline problem that came from a failure
to link two elements.

gst_element_link() only returns a boolean true/false which doesn't
provide much info on WHY the link failed.
Even if I wrote my own version that calls gst_pad_link(), that only
returns an enum, and its not exactly clear from the documentation what
conditions cause what results.

When I ran my program under full debug at level 8, I was able to
clearly find the root cause. The pad diagnostics listed the source
caps, the target caps, and said they were incompatible. *THAT* is the
kind of internal diagnostic I'd like to be able to receive. I'd even
happily write my own element linking function that took a GError ** to
fill out with appropriate info in case of failure, but I have NO IDEA
how to obtain such diagnostics using the current API.

Can anyone give me any pointers?

--
Stirling Westrup
Programmer, Entrepreneur.
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