[vlc-devel] Flamebait: PulseAudio removal

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le mardi 30 novembre 2010 17:12:10 Colin Guthrie, vous avez écrit :
> >> Lennart has his own priorities here, but he fully accepts that gst is
> >> not appropriate for several use cases (e.g. voip).
> > 
> > I am afraid you couldn't have put it worse. I consider VoIP features
> > (low- latency, symmetric RTP...) to be one of gstreamer largest if not
> > the largest purely technical advantages over LibVLC.
> 
> Perhaps. I'm going on comments from some time ago now. Perhaps things
> have changed or perhaps I just misunderstood. Who knows.

I don't know what Lennart thinks. I just know that gstreamer can do VoIP (with 
farsight, I guess) and VLC cannot. That being the biggest *technical* 
advantage of gstreamer over libvlc.

(...)
> > This is a run-time check. The plugin probe function is still called, and
> > expected to fail before it calls XOpenDisplay().
> 
> Ahh cool. I guess the problem remains that VLC could be compiled against
> 0.9,22 but still run against 0.9.21 which was my main concern with a
> compile-time option (there is no libpulse lib-major difference as the
> API is the same).

That's would be a packaging bug. vlc-plugin-pulse should require a high enough 
version of libpulse. As upstream, we can only try to warn packagers.

> A runtime check should be fairly simple. Do you want me to take a look
> still or do you think the current approach will catch enough of the
> problem cases (most users should upgrade all their distro packages
> together after all and if you self compile it should be caught too).

A run-time check will require the PA plugin be linked to libX11, unless you 
want to play ugly dlsym() tricks. I would rather avoid that.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis