Re: GStreamer regression analysis [was: GNOME and GStreamer]

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 1/16/06, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:

> From what I've read so far (and I admit I have not come close to
> reading the whole thread) the right thing to do here is to encourage

Well, there's one part that stuck out to me that I'm not sure if you
saw, so let me point it out...

> developers and testers to use 0.10, and aim strongly for using 0.10 in
> gnome 2.16, but to assume that we'll officially depend on 0.8 and
> recommend it to distributors, end-users, etc. Yes, it'll be
> effectively unsupported, but it will be exactly the same in those
> terms as 2.12, whereas 0.10 will be a big step backwards in many
> respects from 2.12, which should be unacceptable for us and will be
> damaging to our users and our hard-earned reputation for stability.

A lot of the concentration on the regressions has perhaps sidelined
another important fact only mentioned a couple times in the thread: If
I understand correctly (that's a big if; others can correct me if I'm
wrong), 0.10 fixes tons of problems relative to 0.8.  Thus our
reputation for 'stability' in the sense of 'doesn't crash' appears to
be in much greater danger of being damaged by staying with 0.8. 
'stability' in the sense of 'stuff that works in release X works in
X+1' is what could be damaged by transitioning to 0.10 from 0.8.  It
looks like a nasty toss-up to me, one which is really hard to me to
judge from a bugsquad perspective which is better or worse.  Which is
why I think we need community feedback -- and why Vincent posted the
email to d-d-l asking for it there.

This thread really needs to be moved to that list.