Re: GStreamer version for 2.14

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 16:14 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:

> JWZ is an ass, and has been for a long time. If forced to take the
> admittedly unpleasant choice between overwhelming maintainers so that
> they never look at bugzilla at all, or incorrectly closing bugs which
> might be reopened later, we should *always* choose the second option.

In defense of asses, JWZ's bug reports tend to be detailed and he'll
happily follow up on them if you ask nicely.  I know because I fixed
some of them.

His tantrum was on our extremely irresponsible transition from 1.x to
2.0, where no one bothered to see if there were regressions, we didn't
provide a migration path for user's settings, we didn't write migration
documents for all the APIs that got replaced, and we just shoved
everything under the rug.

The bugsquad (did it exist then?) was probably not as good as it is now,
etc. etc., but we cannot say "uh, I guess it may be fixed now" every
time we switch versions.  This includes minor and micro versions.

If a bug has good info on how to reproduce a crash, and the code has
changed so much that the provided stack trace is not relevant anymore,
it is up to the maintainer to attempt to reproduce the crash with the
original instructions, and close the bug if it is irreproducible.

If a bug has only a stack trace and no info on how to reproduce it, feel
free to mark it NEEDINFO immediately, or even INCOMPLETE/INVALID.

Speaking of GStreamer...

We should probably start to become stricter on API/ABI stability for the
desktop suite, not only the platform suite.  Users only see our desktop,
never the platform; if the desktop breaks because a desktop-only library
broke things, users will think that GNOME sucks as a whole.

I'm thinking that we need to change our release model a bit, so that we
have a user branch and a developer/experimental branch at all times, and
it is ONLY the ongoing user branch that we ship to distros and thus
users.

  Federico