Re: GStreamer version for 2.14

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 1/15/06, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> So, the release team messed up and didn't keep close enough tabs on
> everything, resulting in discovering an issue pretty late. We need to
> try to find rough consensus in the community.

So, here's my understanding of this thread and the alternate one[1]
(feel free to correct anything I got wrong; I am not an expert in this
area by any means):

- There is no good or optimal solution; all choices have multiple
drawbacks.  :(  We still have to pick one, though.
- 0.10 is more stable in the doesn't-crash sense, but has a less
complete set of plugins and thus cannot handle as many formats
- The regressions that exist from the less complete set of plugins are
limited to totem
- these regressions are for formats we can't ship anyway, though they
do limit  what can be played in totem for those
non-tree-hugging-lefties[2] who would otherwise be able to just
download extra plugins.
- 0.8 has very little development or maintenance effort and has
unfixable problems due to inherently problematic API (causing various
crashes, as noted above)
- 0.8 and 0.10 can be installed simultaneously, though actively
depending on both is a bigger maintenance load that would probably be
better spent fixing stuff, and it may also be more annoying to users
since preference applets only affect settings for one of the two
versions (granted, this will only affect the users who don't want to
use the defaults and who are able to understand those dialogs)
- Those actively working on gstreamer now recommend 0.10, Ronald (who
has done *huge* amounts of gstreamer work in the past and is
volunteering to continue to work on 0.8 as his time permits) prefers
0.8
- most distros appear to be moving to 0.10 (JDS, Ubuntu, Fedora;
Fedora is shipping both versions, but 'gstreamer' is 0.10 while
there's also a 'gstreamer08')
- not knowing what we're using is holding up the 2.13.5 release

So, here's my proposal:
Ship with 0.10.  Have everything default to it.  Also include 0.8 in
the ftp directory, but not used.  Include a big old section in the
release notes explaining the situation and letting people know that
they can recompile totem or compile a second version of totem against
0.8 if they wish.



[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2006-January/msg00038.html.
[2] http://thomas.apestaart.org/log/, 2006-1-16 posting (couldn't find
a direct link, sorry)