Re: GStreamer regression analysis [was: GNOME and GStreamer]

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

> > > - first start takes hellishly long (>10s on my laptop), apparently
> > > because of a registry rebuild. You'll need to provide some user feedback
> > > here (e.g. a splash screen), the user will think the app is broken and
> > > Linux (or GNOME, for that matter) sucks.
> > 
> > That's a long time indeed (even if it only happens once).

You should see it do this with an uninstalled GStreamer on my slow-ass
laptop HD :) 1 minute is not unheard of.

Ronald, 10 s - is this uninstalled or installed ? You should time the
startup of that, I'm going to put money on most time being spent in disk
seeks.

Some people discussed the idea of making the registry emit signals while
loading plug-ins, to enable gimp-style loading dialogs, but most people
hated the idea and prefer to work on speeding up the load instead.

>  A better
> > solution though would be if packages with plugins ran gst-inspect-0.10
> > in their post-install, which should eliminate the need to automatically
> > re-build the plugin registry when starting a GStreamer application after
> > that, as gst-inspect has already caused it to be rebuilt after package
> > installation. I consider this a packaging problem in the end. We should
> > celebrate the fact that there is no more gst-register in 0.10 by the
> > way, after it caused quite a few problems in 0.8.
> 
> No, gst-register wasn't causing problems in 0.8, it was the fact that it
> was *required* to run gst-register and have applications crash otherwise
> that was causing problems. Where was it explained that gst-inspect
> should be run when new plugins are installed? Why remove gst-register if
> it's simply to have it replaced by another program?

Precisely to address the issue of gst-register being required to run.
Now that any app can rebuild the registry (but it takes a little time to
do so), the need for a specialized binary for this task is gone.

However, if startup time on the first run of any gstreamer app after
installing a plugin is an issue, distributors can choose to trigger a
registry rebuild by running any gstreamer binary.  gst-inspect then
makes the most sense.

So Tim meant to say what you said - the fact that it was required to run
it caused the most problems.  I hope people are happy that that's gone,
not angry :)

Thomas

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