A lesson [LWN.net]

A lesson

Posted Sep 25, 2012 9:31 UTC (Tue) by Company (guest, #57006)
In reply to: A lesson by khim
Parent article: GStreamer 1.0 released

You cannot install the same GStreamer application for both 0.10 and 1.0.

You only have one Totem, one Pitivi and one Cheese application on your computer. And most likely your distro will not even let you choose which one.

So in that sense GStreamer is just like the desktops.

PS: GStreamer got a lot of its inspiration for parallel-installability from GNOME back when GNOME 2.0 and GStreamer 0.6 came out.

to post comments

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 11:02 UTC (Wed) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (3 responses)

> You cannot install the same GStreamer application for both 0.10 and 1.0.
>
> You only have one Totem, one Pitivi and one Cheese application on your
> computer. And most likely your distro will not even let you choose which
> one.
>
> So in that sense GStreamer is just like the desktops.

Can an application like Totem support both 0.10 and 1.0?

But I'm not sure what you mean, since of course you can have two Totems or
Cheeses. I have several versions of some applications. They just have to be
installed in /opt or ~/whatever.

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 22:46 UTC (Wed) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link] (2 responses)

No, an application cannot support both at the same time because there'd be name collisions.

You can of course install the application twice, once into /usr and once into /opt. But that works for GNOME or KDE, too. In fact, GNOME development is done that way. Everyone has the distro's GNOME installed in /usr and a jhbuild somewhere in the home directory or /opt.

A lesson

Posted Oct 1, 2012 14:31 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

> No, an application cannot support both at the same time because there'd be name collisions.

Well, it could if the library used symbol versioning

There's lots and lots of features in shared libraries to make backward compatibility work. But it seems that glibc is the only library out there that uses it (thank god, it makes glibc upgrades extremely safe).

A lesson

Posted Oct 1, 2012 14:48 UTC (Mon) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link]

That's not strictly true - while there are many libraries that don't use symbol versioning there are also many (other than glibc) which do.

To name a few: libstdc++, zlib, libpng, libjpeg-turbo, libxml2, etc, etc.

A lesson

Posted Sep 27, 2012 0:10 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You cannot install the same GStreamer application for both 0.10 and 1.0.

Why would I want to do that? Or ever: why would I care about that? hIt's some magic pixie dust programmers are using to show me pretty pictures. I don't want to even think about it. If one program wants to use 0.10 - it can do that, if it wants to use 1.0 - it can do that, too. I don't care what they use actually. I just want to see which version I like better: old one or new one. And if I like 0.10-based Totem, but 1.0-based Pitivi then that's fine with me.

So in that sense GStreamer is just like the desktops.

Sadly this is not so. I can not decide when to upgrade. I may decide to keep GNOME2 pr GNOME3 - and that's it. I can not combine them. Not without third-party packages like MATE.