Making 3rd party gstreamer codecs work in F22

[Kalev Lember]

On 04/27/2015 01:11 AM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> Telling users to install a F21 repo in F22 sounds like a recipe for
> disaster. Should we really make it easier to do that?

Yes, it's not ideal, but I'm willing to close my nose and just do what's 
needed if it gets us happier users.

You are probably right in that most users wouldn't go installing 3rd 
party repos that are explicitly marked as F21 only, however they're 
likely to run into dependency issues when upgrading from F21->F22 if 
they have those repos enabled. And this makes us look bad and leads to 
bad user experience.

Also, I would say that Fedora needs to do better than it's doing
right now with ABI compatibility in order to attract third party 
software. I know that there are future plans to make this easier for 
third party developers (containerized apps and atomic base images etc), 
but all that is still at least a year away. And in the mean time we've 
got Fedora releases going out that need to work.

Secondly, third parties need time to switch over to new API / ABI. If we
swap out an ABI, we can't expect third parties to keep up with Fedora
development and release new builds _while new fedora release is being
developed_. It's fine for us to ask them to do that _after_ we've put
out a release, so that they can install the new release and play with it
and test things and finally do a new build. But I would say it's
unreasonable for us to ask them to keep up with Fedora's pre-GA releases.

In general, I would say that whenever we do an ABI bump and notice that 
a major third party app is using the old ABI, we should provide a compat 
package for one Fedora release to give them time to migrate. This is 
just common courtesy, since we can't possibly package up all the code in 
the world and need third parties to succeed as a distro.


> We could point users towards Fluendo's MP3 gstreamer plugin in the
> meantime....

Sure, I wouldn't mind better integration with that :)

-- 
Kalev