I wasn’t happy enough with the new format of plugins’ structures, using direct literals rather than having to define functions to return them. As I said before, it makes more sense to set the identifier, the description and the textdomain directly on the plugin_info_t, so that the plugin does not need to be initialised at all to have its name and the description.
So I started doing this now, and the result up to now seems quite interesting: there are a few extra dereferences in a couple of points, but the functions that load the description of the plugins are quite smaller now, as they don’t have to open the plugin anymore).
What is the problem now? The problem is that there are a bit more than 150 plugins in xine that needs to be modified to comform to the new interface, it’s not a quick task, and it’s actually quite boring. And everytime I do something like that I start to wonder why am I doing that, considering that I’m not paid to do this, and I receive very little feedback about xine…
Once all the plugins are converted, I should be able to assess the improvement and make sure that I didn’t break anything in the plugin loader.
After that, I’ll have to put hands on the catalog generator so that I can save the description on the plugins cache, which should improve even more the loading of descriptions.
And finally, when this is done, I’ll have to take care of all the demuxer plugins again trying to move extensions and mimetype information again directly on the structure exported by the plugin.
That is a prerequisite for having mimetype demuxer detection, which in turn is a requirement for Shoutcast to always work properly, one of the nastiest bugs in Amarok.
Now, I don’t want to appear a pusher, but as I actually know how I’m feeling, I can tell you that if you really want to see xine-lib 1.2 released someday next year, an appreciation sign is certainly useful 😉 That can be a “thank you” mail or comment, something from my wishlist or at least the bug reports going directly on the tracker…
Hi Diego.First of all, THANK YOU for putting all the hard work into xine. It has been rather quiet on the xine front this year and it’s nice some progress is being made after all.Now to your question, why you put all those hours of work into a project you earn nothing with. Don’t get me wrong but if you really have to ask yourself that, you should consider that this is really not what makes you happy because that is what it is all about having fun and enjoying yourself while working on an open source project. Way back there was a time when I was active on xine myself and I guess I still have cvs access but unfortunately I lacked the proper math knowledge and some other stuff, to work on the really interesting areas. That was quite frustrating. Today things changed. I am almost through with university and now I’d be more able to work on the interesting stuff but like always: I lack the time. :-)So to make a long story short: even though I think it’s great to have someone take care of xine, it’s more important that you are happy with it and enjoy yourself while putting all that effort in.So again, THANKS and I hope you find it in yourself that this is really what you like to do. :-)Last but not least. I discovered your blog just recently and since then I come back daily. I really enjoy reading your entries especially the tech ones. 🙂 I sure hope you keep this one up.MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR to you.Take care,matthew
thanks for your hard work.Merry Christmas to you .
Hey flameeyes,Just like Matthew said above, I really appreciate all of your work on xine, and on Gentoo too. Please, though, don’t burn yourself out. Keep it fun, don’t do things you really hate unless you’re getting a reward from it :)I really do kind-of like doing boring maintenance work, so if it’s something like that, I wouldn’t mind helping out, and sending you a patch. Just email me. I have time :)Happy Holidays!
Thnq for making multimedia more pleasent, flameeyes. Have a rest and spend holidays with your family and friends, xine-lib can wait:)
Oh don’t worry, I won’t burn up that easily, especially now that I got my C&C3 to play with ) It really makes me feel like I was back twelve years ago when I learnt to play real time strategy games with Dune 2. It’s really westwood-style, even if the gameplay has been quite more improved, with garrisoning and similar stuff.But I do maintain xine, even if it’s not something I would like to pass my life doing, because, well, nobody else is and I do feel bad about abandoning the project. Especially since it’s probably the most useful thing I’ve done lately (and this says a lot about the rest of stuff I’ve been doing).And Matthias, the question comes mostly because lately I’ve had to take care of the boring bits too 🙂 There are tons of interesting things I’m happy to do with xine, the problem is that there are also a ton of boring bits that nobody else takes care of; even if I don’t really pay much attention to 1.1 lately (so I can focus on more interesting things I’ve been doing with 1.2), being alone working on the new features makes it take longer to have them up and running, and thus frustrates me quite a bit more.Hopefully this might change in the future.Also, I rarely get any user feedback on the work done, that’s quite enough of a pay for me, when it comes 🙂 These three comments really made my day 🙂
Lots of xine users, it is just a lower level lib that isn’t as in your face as say Amarok. It just works for me in Gentoo, and for that I must say thanks :-).