Re: GNOME 2.2 screenshots (& GStreamer & automake)

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

Hi,

(answering a few mails at once on the thread)

> at work...
> 
> Without the parallel install we're also going to have to endure a
> month of everything being broken all the time, since we have to try to
> get everyone to migrate at once.
> 
> Personally I'm inclined to back gstreamer down to 1.4 rather than go
> through the mess. Maybe we can do new automake for GNOME 2.4. ;-) I
> have yet to hear what new automake buys us that warrants the enormous
> world of migration pain.

If you want to undertake this for GStreamer, be our guest. Personally we 
can't see how people can live with am 1.4 any longer.  The per-target 
flags alone warrant a transition.  Also, I'm sure none of us would like to 
hear someone say that he doesn't want to upgrade to gnome2 because he 
doesn't yet see what it buys them ;)

OTOH, I think there are easy solutions to move modules one by one to it.  
For example, for GStreamer I added options like "--with-autoconf" and 
"--with-automake" to autogen.sh allowing you to specify other versions of 
these tools (which was partly done to help Gnome hackers complaining 
because they're using ancient build tools, and partly because redhat 
installed automake-1.5 in redhat 7.3).

I don't see no reason at all why this can't be done for gnome-autogen as 
well.  In short, I see no reason why Gnome cannot be upgraded to take 
advantage of the new build tools.  If we expect millions of users to 
upgrade glib and gtk and other stuff, surely us hackers can install two 
versions of build tools for a few weeks ?

> > and the decision to require GStreamer at the libgnome level (as
> > suggested by many, and patched by Jorn) presents an interesting
> > socio-political one. ;-)
> 
> My personal belief is that it's too soon for that.  There's ongoing
> discussion of this for the interoperability hothouse at LWE for
> example.

Yeah, that might be a bit too soon.  GStreamer is still relatively young 
and just now reaching the stage where more complex apps can be built on 
top of it.  Also, while we have improved hugely in quality, we still need 
people working with it for apps to let us know what they want.  There is 
lots of stuff that could be added, and we need some more time to learn 
some more quality assurance stuff - like how not to break API's and such.
So I'd rather have some actual gnome hackers trying to get into and work 
with GStreamer so we can get their perspective on the matters.


As for GStreamer having to be in Gnome CVS, there are advantages and 
disadvantages.
Personally, I think it's a bit irritating that anonymous cvs on gnome lags 
so much.  We still fix a lot of impromptu bugs by request on IRC and it's 
really nice that people can check them out immediately.
As for it really needing it to be in CVS, I'm not sure about that.  First 
of all, how much of the core and the plug-ins need to be translated ? It's 
a library without much UI stuff in it.
We have considered moving the player to gnome's cvs, so that could be 
done.  But the core and the plug-ins, in our opinion, don't really 
necessarily need to be moved.  ie: we'd need good reason to do so.
Especially from a political standpoint, we would consider it a bad move.  
We still hope to somehow move more KDE people to use GStreamer.


 Thomas

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