Re: Support both gstreamer 0.10 and 1.0 for GNOME 3.6?

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hello Sébastien,

Em Sat, 2012-07-28 às 10:20 +0200, Sebastien Bacher escreveu:
> Hey,
> 
> I've been talking to some people at GUADEC about the gstreamer 0.10 to 
> 1.0 transition and the issues it creates (especially for distributors), 
> one of the outcome of those discussions is that it might be a good idea 
> to ease the transition by supporting both versions for one cycle ... so 
> here we are, I'm emailing d-d-l to do that suggestion.

This is something we've been discussing with Robert Ancell.

> During previous discussions on IRC some maintainers pointed that the api 
> changes were pretty minimal, which means it should be easy enough to 
> ifdef both for one version.

The API changes are minimal, but:
- The build changes are rather bigger, and adding options means more
likely to break
- The code will get harder to understand by the sheer number of tiny API
changes, see for example:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/totem/commit/?id=64f8b8e163cd804240a1427205c4bedb39793e59

> Some issues raised with the transition:
> - gstreamer 1.0 has not been released yet

There are development releases that date back a couple of weeks, and
there will be more releases before GNOME 3.6 is out.

> - gstreamer 1.0 didn't get lot of user testing yet

It did, quite a bit, as it's been in development for a number of years,
and will do even more in the coming months.

> - it might end up that some components rely on gstreamer 1.0 in GNOME 
> 3.6 and some 0.10, distributors might not want to ship,support 2 
> gstreamer stacks though

In the GNOME core modules, there's Totem, sound-juicer, and Cheese, all
of which have been ported to GStreamer 1.0, the porting of small users
(Evolution's audio preview) and related (gnome-control-center using
libcheese). The only big user is Empathy, and that's the only blocker
really.

In Fedora, we should have all the users on the live CD ported and
packaged up shortly after GUADEC.

> - some codecs haven't been ported yet (the fluendo mp3 one for example)

Chicken and egg. Fluendo won't port the codecs if nobody uses GStreamer
1.0. And if you won't use GStreamer 1.0 because the Fluendo codecs
haven't been ported...

> What do you think about doing a smooth transition by supporting both for 
> a cycle?

Backtracking now would probably be more costly, but might be necessary
if Empathy cannot be ported.

Cheers