Re: GNOME and GStreamer

["Ronald S. Bultje" <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

On Sat, 2006-01-14 at 17:55 +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> First of all, because of your objections (and only because of yours) the
> committing was done one a branch.  AFAIK everyone is free to make
> branches.

You could've asked to be sure that I would say no. I've been the only
active maintainer in the past >1 yr.

> Why are you being this contrary ? I realize you've invested a lot of
> time and effort in GStreamer 0.8 (as have we), but I don't understand
> why you're actively resisting a move forward. 

I want GNOME to have as good media support as possible for end users.
Those are people that buy mp4 songs and watch quicktime trailers from
Apple, or download mp3s/movies online, or watch DVDs/VCDs, or view WMV
movies on msnbc or the likes, or put their whole song collection on
their ipod or mp3 player (regardless of the source or target format) or
buy music CDs and import that to their computer or other similar things
or combinations of the above; people who are not native in English will
use foreign subtitles, and people not only want media players, they want
a webcam capture application, they want a tv application with capture
support, audio/video editors, audio recording, use media in
presentations, and so on and so on. GStreamer, in all those, is a
toolkit, not an application. We don't make decisions, we provide the
platform. The fact that you believe that doing anything besides Ogg is
illegal is irrelevant for both developers and most end users. They just
want to do it. I've put in a lot of effort in I-don't-care-what-version
to make sure that users would be able to enjoy the until then
theoretically marvelous but practically useless stable version. That's
been a pain and costed me many 24/7 weeks (I've practically thrown away
one study year by doing that), most of which is unpaid personal free
time. Many people were thankful for it, but all that work has been
thrown away, we're back at square one.

If you would not obstruct those, I wouldn't care less, and would simply
continue my work. However, my work to get support for those use cases
back in the new 0.10 tree was actively obstructed by formal
manager-driven (?!?) design rules and other political bullshit, which
caused me to resign as developer, since I have no interest in being told
what to do in my free time by other, less capable people. That's why I
think 0.10 is no more than a theoretical blib right now. When it's
reached end user usefulness, I'll be interested.

However, this is a personal issue, not of interest to GNOME, so let's
just stick to seeing how end-user-useful GStreamer-x.y.z is for GNOME
and its applications, decide and move on.

Ronald