[arch-general] phonon: gstreamer support will be dropped

[Alberto Gonzalez]

On Friday 23 January 2009, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Alberto Gonzalez <info at gnebu.es> wrote:
> > Gstreamer has its problems, but it's used by all the gnome people (most
> > Ubuntu/Fedora users and more) so it's can't be that bad. Not as to not
> > allow users to use it if they want to.
>
> I'm fairly certain Pierre is not saying "screw choice!" here. It looks
> to me like he's saying "oh god, this is WAY too buggy and I don't want
> our users using something this broken". That said, i'm sure the
> PKGBUILD will still be around somewhere, so anyone who wants to can
> still build the package themselves

"I don't want our users using something this broken" is not a good idea, IMHO. 
No one is going to use it unless they want to. They have to actually install 
it and configure KDE to use it. Why remove this _option_? I'm sorry that 
Gstreamer doesn't work for Pierre, but for many others it does (while xine 
doesn't, for other reasons I already mentioned).

So what I say is: If the phonon developers allow to use different backends, 
let's just don't limit them for no good reason (a good reason would be more 
like: "compiling support for Gstreamer breaks Xine", not "I don't like 
Gstreamer, it doesn't work for me". As I said, it's not like Gstreamer is an 
obscure or experimental multimedia framework, it's probably the most used one 
in the Unix world, so it can't be that bad for everyone).