[Swfdec] State of the art

[Benjamin Otte]

Hi people,

here's a little status report on my swfdec hacking and what I'm intending
to do in the near future.

The swfdec codebase right now is in a releasable state and I intend to cut
a release when I've hacked up a mozilla plugin that's "good enough". I've
also updated the READMEs and stuff like that, so it contains at least a
bit of docs right now.

I have removed (or intend to do) all plugins or applications that are not
needed for developing the library from swfdec. They were mostly outdated
and need to be rewritten or forgotten and I wanted to make the swfdec
package appealing and not have lots of dependencies.
So what's gonna happen to the plugins:
- I've removed the GStreaamer plugin. While it should still be no problem
  to write one, I don't have a need for it. My changes to swfdec changed
  its purpose from a simple Flash playback engine to an interactive Flash
  engine. GStreamer wasn't very helpful there.
- The mozilla plugin will soon start to exist in a seperate package,
  swfdec-mozilla. Developing it as a seperate package seemed most useful
  to me. And it has the added bonus of checking that the swfdec-dev
  package works ;)
- The Gimp and gdk-pixbuf loader seemed a bit problematic for an
  interactive application and they were quite buggy even with the old
  swfdec, so I removed them completely.

The current codebase now contains:
- libswfdec, the main library. I've reduced the amount of installed
  headers as much as possible so I can mess with the API as much as I'd
  like without causing too much trouble.
- two noinst programs swfplay and swfdebug in the player/ dir for playing
  or debugging libswfdec. The code might be useful to develop Flash GUI
  apps, but I haven't spent too much time thinking about that.
- Some simple tools in the test/ dir. They're not installed either.
  Notable might be swfdec-extract that can extract Flash objects from the
  file (both audio and sprites).
- A set of simple but easyly extensible tests in the test/ subdirs. They
  contain a README.

If my motivation doesn't leave me, I plan to continue developing this
stuff without any artifical bounds like API stability or stuff like this
in the 0.4 series. I hope to switch to a release early, release often
method now that there's actually something to show (aka a moz plugin).
If suddenly a lot of interest develops in a stable API, I'll certainly
change that behaviour, but for now when it's pretty much just us and most
of the work goes into the lib, it doesn't seem to make sense to do that.

David, is there anything I need to know about releases, like where to send
release announcements or similar? I probably need a place to put the
tarballs, too.

Eric, please contact me on IRC. I need the swfdec-mozilla git repo and
have been told I need an admin to set that up.

And someone needs to fill swfdec.freedesktop.org with content. Currently
it's an empty wiki. Any volunteers?

Comments? Thank you's? Bugs?

Benjamin


PS: If anyone were to hook up swfdec with gtk-doc support, that would be
very nice. I'm always scared of it...