glib comments

[Havoc Pennington]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 05:42:28PM -0800, Neil Stevens wrote: 
> But, if glib versions will stay compatible for years, then I doubt that'd 
> be a problem.  The issue then becomes GStreamer's own compatibility.

fwiw, GNOME has the same issue - we will also expect gstreamer to stay
ABI-locked for some time once it's classified as a "platform library."

I would expect that the gstreamer developers would commit to some
conformance with KDE policy in this area as a condition of being
included in KDE.

> But linking isn't my complaint.  Developing is my complaint.  KDE 
> developers shouldn't have to be glib developers.  KDE developers should be 
> able to extend the KDE-chosen media system without learning some C 
> toolkit.

Right, it's an understandable concern. fwiw, here is an old writeup on
this problem, but it's a very hypothetical/far-future type of thing:
  http://people.redhat.com/~hp/runtime.html

So far all the shared cross-desktop implementations we have are in
plain C - CUPS, Xlib, ICE, fontconfig/Xft2, Xcursor, Xr, maybe someday
D-BUS, etc. This pretty much sucks for GNOME as well as KDE, plain C
isn't really any fun. It'd be cool if we could develop some ideas to
address this someday. But probably that's a tangent from the immediate
issue at hand. ;-)

Havoc