GStreamer on freedesktop

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

> The problem with gstreamer, is that the design choices are by no means  
> agnostic. It's designed to fit in and fill some of the voids in the 
> GNOME-environment,

It is the first time I have ever ran across your name.  I myself have
been working on GStreamer for what I think is close to 3 years now.  I
don't really see why you think you can make such claims when you don't
even know how GStreamer was designed and I have never known you to be involved
with GStreamer.

(Skip the history if you don't need it and continue at ***)
GStreamer was designed to be C right from the start as to, at the time,
get the maximum amount of leverage and bindings to other languages, as
well as make it easy to be run on embedded systems.  It is a choice, and
the choice wasn't C++.

At the time of its inception, and during a very long time, it had
nothing at all to do with GNOME.  It used glib for one purpose only;
because it is a very useful C library with a very useful object model. 
Period.

At some point, GNOME people started taking notice, as well as some
GStreamer people (myself included) started thinking about what use
GStreamer could be in a desktop platform, and some of us also started to
take an interest in developing for one of the two big platforms.  Again,
it was a choice (this time for me personally), and the choice was
GNOME.  The reasons why again aren't very important.

At some point GNOME was proposed and accepted into the GNOME desktop at
some level.  So GStreamer got into GNOME because it was a viable
solution, not some other way around.


>  and while it could be used _from_ KDE, it could never work 
> a part of, as I does things in it is own way (porting gstreamer completly to 
> KDE would _proberbly_ be a lovely project taking up less than 50% of the 
> current code, but being impossible to comaintain with original gstreamer).

Doing it in python or mono would probably take less than 50% of the C++
implementation.  I fail to see the point you're making.  And I have no
interest in getting into discussions on whether or not C or C++ or
assembler is better.  If I needed a library for something and the
library happened to be C++, I would use it.
>   
> >From that perspective I do not think they should be moved to freedesktop.org, 
> since it's not fundamentally designed to be desktop-agnostic, despite the 
> developers ambitions. Depending on gobject is just a symptom of this.

(***)

It's always been designed to be desktop-agnostic.  As I've said, I see
no reason why you're in a position to claim it is not.  If you really
want to add some weight to your statements back them up with facts.

I honestly don't see no need for projects to start bashing each other at
each opportunity they get.  You are not helping the project you are
trying to defend with your statements.  

Have you noticed how I managed to reply to your post without making any
disparaging comment about C++, KDE, or any other project ? It is possible.
I wish KDE all the best and hope they prosper so the total amount of
Open Source-based desktops keeps rising.  There is 99% of market out there
to take, no need to fight over the 1% already using one.

This is Freedesktop, and as I understand it this list is meant to bring users of
various desktops closer together.  I have no problem getting closer with
some of the KDE people who happen to have the same openminded view as I
have from the GNOME side.  You should try the same.

Thanks
Thomas