[pulseaudio-discuss] Export pulsecore and pulsecommon header file

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 25.03.09 18:43, Zhang, Xing Z (xing.z.zhang at intel.com) wrote:

> Hi Lennart:

> More and more people like me are working on writing module of PA. A
> problem we encountered is current PA dev-pkg released by
> distribution vendor only includes header files for application but
> not for module.
>
> Did you think about export pulsecore/pulsecommon header files to
> module programmers so that modules can be developed with dev pkg
> such as pulseaudio-devel-0.9.15-10.1.fedaro.i586.rpm. I tried to do
> this by attached patch but accomplished nothing due to config.h
> produced by autoconf can not be exported.
>
> Do you have any suggestion to pass this issue? It will really
> benefit module programmers much if the process of writing a PA
> module is as easy as writing an application in distribution.

At this point the PA module API is not declared stable, and I am not
sure it will be anytime soon. Thus maintaining modules outside of the
tree is pain. If you develop your own modules the best way is probably
keeping things in a git clone of the upstream repo and then rebasing
from time to time. Also, I encourage everyone to submit your patches
upstream. If the code is good I am happy to merge even modules that
are not of any direct use to myself or anyone else besides your
company. If you submit things upstream this has the big advantage that
I will look over them from time to time and might even update them
when I change the module API in some way.

I am sorry, but I think allowing the core headers to be installed
would send the wrong signal to developers: it suggests the API would
be stable -- which it is not.

We could cut a compromise however: install those header files only if
a specific configure switch
--enable-core-headers-i-know-this-is-not-stable or so. To accomplish
that we'd however need some non-trivial changes to fix the config.h
situation. That could be done the same way how glib generates
/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include/glibconfig.h. Patches welcome.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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