Improving Internal Diagnostics?

[Stirling Westrup]

Thanks. Alas grepping the logs is not very useful as *I* have a bug
against my application that it doesn't give very good diagnostics of
why a set of command-line flags failed. And that's because I often
can't tell why it failed...


On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Tim-Philipp Müller <t.i.m at zen.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 14:13 -0500, Stirling Westrup wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> With a bit of experience, you know what to grep the debug log for.
>
> You can't currently easily obtain that information via API (other than
> querying caps yourself and checking).
>
> It constitutes a programming error, but it is certainly something we
> have plans to improve.
>
> There's bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350545 for this,
> and I have some ideas how to do it, hopefully in the 1.3.x development
> cycle.
>
> Cheers
>  -Tim
>
> _______________________________________________
> gstreamer-devel mailing list
> gstreamer-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/gstreamer-devel



-- 
Stirling Westrup
Programmer, Entrepreneur.
https://www.linkedin.com/e/fpf/77228
http://www.linkedin.com/in/swestrup
http://technaut.livejournal.com
http://sourceforge.net/users/stirlingwestrup