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

[Sebastien Bacher <seb128 ubuntu com>]

Le 28/07/2012 14:15, Bastien Nocera a écrit :
> Hello Sébastien,
Hey Bastien,

> 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
Ok, fair enough, it's true that supporting 2 versions is complicating 
the code and making testing harder, it also makes also harder to deal 
with bug reports.

> > 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.

Right, those are still beta versions and the schedule tight (it might 
end up gstreamer 1.0 gets delayed a bit longer for whatever reason)
> > - 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.

Well devel serie testing and end user testing is not the same thing. In 
practice very few ported applications reached distribution users yet 
which means in fact the feedback has been pretty limited.

> > - 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.
Great to see progresses here. Do you know what's the status of the 
rhythmbox port and when it's likely to land?

There are a few ones I didn't see listed and that don't seem ported yet: 
shotwell (does it needs vala to get bindings for gstreamer 1 first?), 
brasero, sushi, (libreoffice? seems to be in the gst0.10 rdepends list 
on Ubuntu but I didn't check why)

> > - 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...

I'm not sure what Fluendo's schedule is but they said they were looking 
at porting their codecs, next cycle would probably be a safer target for 
those who need those though I guess.

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

Ok, as long as one version only is used by the core desktop I think it's 
a fair decision for GNOME to go with the new version.

Distributors might have extra external constrains (shipping things out 
of the GNOME core, extra codecs, ...) and a more conservative approach 
to updates (and the potential regressions due to those) but that's a 
downstream issue at this point.

Just as a note, Ubuntu will likely stay on gst0.10 for its default 
installation still this cycle so we will hold back on updates for 
components that drop support for that version, if as an upstream 
maintainer you have issues with that please talk to us.

--
Sebastien Bacher