Re: GNOME and non-linux platforms (release team please stand up)

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

Hi,

> FWIW, I've been advocating for a while that, for example, GStreamer
> should aim to provide everything an application needs - ie. a complete
> framework. This came up when Cheese was being ported from HAL to use
> libgudev for device discovery. Now, the actual device interaction
> already happened in GStreamer, e.g. you use the v4l source and pass it a
> device file. But device detection etc. was missing. Having all that in
> GStreamer will make Cheese easily portable to Solaris, Windows, OS X and
> so on (and AFAICT these changes are happening in GStreamer so kudos to
> these guys).

Funny you should mention this cause the GStreamer team had some
discussions with Alexander Larsson among others about having glib
support for device detection. I guess the conclusion is that also the
GStreamer devs agree a cross platform device detection setup would be
nice, but I guess there is still some disagreement on where it
belongs :)

Anyway, I like your suggestion for the 3 tiered stack as it should give
everyone involved a clear idea about what the GNOME community will
undertake to ensure works across all platforms and what the OS
communities themselves need to take care of.

My hope is that someone like the release team would issue a statement
with what our guidelines are currently, in relation to these issues, as
I feel we are in a very freewheeling stage now where the boundaries for
when platform specific stuff is a feature and when its a bug is
constantly changing. Adopting something along the lines of your proposal
would help clarify the situation and people working on Solaris and
FreeBSD for instance would at least have something clear to work from.

Christian