[vlc-devel] [PATCH] sd: remove -S/--services-discovery option

[Pierre Ynard]

> The option -S/--services-discoveries implies that we maintain a single
> shared list of opened media sources in the core, used by all the
> interfaces, in which we will append the SD on start.

It does not imply that. It means preloading some SD modules. Which is
not a meaningless concept, and that's one reason I don't think it should
be removed.

Apart of maintaining a single shared list, there are other ways to
handle this:

1/ Having the core initialization code load and take a reference on
every passed SD module. Not terribly useful as this gives no way to
access, browse and play whatever was discovered, but at least it allows
running particular SD modules and making sure they never get unloaded.

2/ Same as 1/ and also exposing the list of SD preloaded by the core, so
interfaces concerned by SD can use them.

3/ Having each interface concerned by SD parse, process and honor -S
themselves.

> The interfaces might behave differently regarding SD. For example, Qt
> opens all SD for a specific category when the corresponding UI view is
> selected, and close them when the view is destroyed.

Great, indiscriminately launching queries to plenty of services, in
particular third-party network ones, for literally just looking around
the interface. Exactly what we need to generate distrust from users like
me. That must scale well and be robust too, if one of the services is
slow, returns thousands of entries, or is buggy or goes outdated and
fails or crashes.

>  2. Keep the current behavior, and implement SD/media source
>     management in rc/cli.

Don't tell me that the people who removed the SD from the playlist,
where it was naturally accessible to every interface, intend that only
bothering to implement the new API in Qt is fine and sufficient?...

I think that SD browsing should be implemented not only in all
interfaces that support SD loading (or supported it before that feature
was removed because "not worth it"), but also in all interfaces that can
browse and play media from the playlist, and could play SD items loaded
with -S into the old playlist tree.

I guess you might find that maintaining in the core a tree of loaded
SD items might indeed help with that, but I don't know why or how the
playlist was overhauled, so I wouldn't be able to tell.

-- 
Pierre Ynard
"Une âme dans un corps, c'est comme un dessin sur une feuille de papier."