[vlc-devel] new on the block

[John Freed]

Hi, I've been a VLC user for a long time and love it.

Recently, I was using it to play albums and noticed problems with the cover
art display. A quick Google check verified that this is a problem, and the
reply from the VLC team was, please feel free to submit a patch. Not too
helpful to the typical user, but since I actually know how to program, I
figured, why not.

Not wanting to learn yet-another-language (lua), I started with the HTTP
interface, since I can do HTTP, C and Javascript. And discovered what I now
see is called the "oldhttp" module. Working from the 1.1.13 source, I
noticed some outright errors and killed a memory leak. Since this seemed to
be going well, before proceeding I decided to look at the developer wiki,
which is why I'm here now.

I see that people are encouraged to contribute to the latest development
line, so I installed git and now have things set up for 1.3. Note that I
entirely skipped 1.2, which I see might be called 2.0. (By the way, my
input as a user is that 2.0 indicates an overhaul, where I'd expect changes
in the user interface, whereas 1.2 would retain the old interface but offer
improved performance and maybe some new bells and whistles.)

Long story short, I can build 1.3 (though it gives me a segmentation fault,
making debugging difficult!) and wonder where I should be working from.
Going through the archive of vlc-devel, I see there was a debate last March
about oldhttp vs. luahttp, but it appears that oldhttp does not exist in
1.3.

I haven't looked at 1.2, but if oldhttp exists there and you are looking
for patches for 1.2, I'd be more happy to fix the oldhttp interface for a
lot of the reasons expressed there (stability for the most part -- my
experience is that it is a lot easier to fix features in a stable interface
than it is to stabilize an interface that has a lot of features). Also, I
assume 1.2 will run, which makes it a lot easier to debug!!! After getting
familiar with that I could branch out.

So, here are my questions:
1) Is it worth my time to contribute to the oldhttp module? If so, where?
2) Regardless of interface, the album art searching/caching needs work,
which I would be happy to contribute to.
3) I live in Paris, do you ever get together face to face?

Thanks,

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/attachments/20120107/917ab406/attachment.html>