[vlc-devel] Re: VLC 0.5.0 ?

[Christophe Massiot]

At 13:29 +0100 8/12/2002, Gildas Bazin wrote :

>I agree that the 0.5.0 release needs to happen soon now. The 0.4.x branch is
>getting much too old and really can't compete with xine, mplayer or such.
>
>On the other hand, if we really want 0.5.0 to be a killer app, we should be
>carefull not to release something in an unfinished state (here I'm talking
>as much from and end-user point of view than a developer point of view).

I'm not against releasing something in an unfinished state, as long 
as it doesn't crash and it doesn't have regressions from 0.4.6. Our 
experience shows that our users are very tolerant towards us. And I'd 
like to have an official release before someone compiles the CVS and 
releases it on VersionTracker. I definitely do not want the pre-0.4.0 
pirate releases to come back with 0.5.0.

My opinion is that with a few exceptions, 0.5.0 is fairly usable, and 
as soon as we release beta versions you can expect all OS X people to 
start downloading them and using them exclusively.

>IMHO there are at least 3 other important features that should go into
>0.5.0:
>
>* Unification of the configuration framework and the variables framework.
>(I'm working on it now). Mainly because users can't set default values
>(preferences) for variables yet, and also because we currently have 2 APIs
>to do similar things.

With all your respect, gibalou, nobody cares. This is the kind of 
under-the-hood improvements which users won't even notice if it's not 
there. Default values for variables weren't settable in 0.4.6 either, 
so people won't see a regression. So I think this shouldn't prevent 
us from releasing 0.5.0, and it can wait for a 0.5.1 if it's not 
ready.

>* Autogeneration of contextual menus in interface plugins.
>Basically, we should be able to register variables which can be modified on
>the fly by users and have the interface plugin autogenerate contextual
>menus from this info. This work is kind of related to the one above.

Of course this is neat, but it takes a lot of time and again, users 
won't even notice if it's not there. For the time being there are 
probably two or three variables which are worth displaying, and I 
suggest that we do what I did in the OS X interface, and hard-code 
the variables to display.

>* I think sam is also working on a very much requested feature, which should
>allow inserting/removing vout filters on the fly (think deinterlacing,
>etc...).

That would be quite interesting too, but again there is no regression 
from 0.4.6, where it was impossible to add filters on the fly. So if 
it's ready for 0.5.0, great, otherwise it can wait for 0.5.1.

>There is also some work/bugfixes required in quite a few areas:
>
>* The libdvdplay plugin isn't currently really stable and chokes on quite a
>few DVD menus.

Yeah I've noticed that on OS X too.

>* 0.5.0 needs heavy testing/tuning under Win9x/Me. It has not been tested at
>all on these OSs.

Let's have a test release ASAP.

>* And I'm sure there are plenty of other things ;)
>(hint: bugzilla.videolan.org)
>
>I don't want to be pessimistic, but I doubt we can do all this before the
>end of the year.

No, that's why I suggest to concentrate on code regressions and crashes.

>However I must say that I would have nothing against a
>pre-release so we can have some bug-reports and iron out things before the
>actual release.

Can anybody provide the list of all the required libraries to compile 
a VLC release ? I have trouble to keep up with that.

-- 
Christophe Massiot.
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