GSOC / VLC status & next steps ...

[Michael Meeks]

On Wed, 2013-08-21 at 13:53 +0200, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
> Very very strong API stability on libVLC.

	Great news :-)

> API functions are added, that's it. Nothing is removed, ABI is kept.
> Extension of API gets with newer functions, if needed.

	Any chance of an easy-to-check version method a-la gtk that we can
depend on ? 

	int libvcl_check_version_is(int major, int minor, int min); 

	or whatever ? IIRC Minh had to fix some other issue without which we
failed to work anyway, so we could depend on a new method being there
easily enough.

> Complete API instability on libVLCcore, but you don't care, and if you
> link to libvlccore, I can't do anything for you :)

	Excellent; of course we need an easy way to check / get parsed versions
to work around bugs, and avoid crashers so ...

> Default is on Program Files (32bits) /VideoLAN/VLC/libvlc.dll
> as recommended by Microsoft.
> Regedit is: HKLM\Software\VideoLAN\VLC\InstallDir as recommended.

	Thanks for that - Minh - we should default to fetching the install path
from the registry key on windows I guess.

> > 		  has nothing but perhaps a normal install path, and
> 
> MacOS X is the usual mess, but we recommend /Applications/VLC.app/ and
> you can find the libvlc.dylib

	Great; thanks.

> > 		  for Linux it's unclear we want to use a system /
> > 		  distro packaged VLC since it's almost certainly
> > 		  pre-broken.
> 
> Linux, what do you mean pre-broken?

	I fully expect that every Linux packager in the world looks at VLC and
says: "but really this is 173 packages bundled together, of which we can
only ship 13 by default" - and explodes the thing into 173
mis-configured pieces, and in doing so destroys the value of VLC to
LibreOffice: ie. "it just works" :-)

	Of course; then (I imagine) most people just go and download the real
thing from videolan.org - so my recommendation is, that we should only
use libVLC if we are reasonably sure it is not the distribution
package :-)

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot