#4: move dependencies to plugins

Contents

1. Motivation
2. Proposal

Proposed by

IOhannes m zmölnig

Proposal type

Architecture

Assigned to release

• Gem 0.93.0
• Gem 0.94_pre1 (Alpha release)

State

draft

Motivation

Gem has support for a lot of libraries and frameworks, mainly for video/image decoding and capturing.

All these dependencies are linked into the Gem core, which has several drawbacks

• the use must install all the dependencies (even for hard to find libraries) in order to acchieve the simplest task
• the maintainer might ship most dependencies, but not all, due to licensing issues
• several objectclasses providing the same functionality (e.g. [pix_video]) differ significantly in how they have to be used in the Pd-world, since different frameworks offer different possibilities
• old and outdated code has to be carried along in the Gem core

Proposal

i propose to move all dependencies (but the most crucial one, like oenGL) into plugins that abstract the interface to all classes of a framework type.

1. g. plugins for

• image loading
• image saving
• film reading/decoding
• film recording
• video capturing
• model loading
• ...

this would allow to develop the Gem core independently from the backend implementations

a generic framework is needed to allow to fine-tune a specific backend, while staying compatible on the patch level.