[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 233230] [GStreamer] MediaPlayerPrivateGStreamer mishandles failure to create WebKitTextCombiner

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233230

--- Comment #12 from Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> ---
(In reply to Adrian Perez from comment #10)
> This element comes from libgstdebugutilsbad.so, which is part of the
> gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad Ubuntu package. It looks to me like a packaging
> issue, and that distro packages should depend on -bad, not only recommend
> it.

Well that's for Calvaris and the other WebKit/GStreamer developers to decide, certainly not for me. I have no strong opinion either way. I'm fine with changing Fedora's packaging to use Requires instead of Recommends if crashing is the desired behavior when the plugins are missing. But look at this:

    // The combiner relies on webvttenc, fail early if it's not there.
    if (!isGStreamerPluginAvailable("subenc")) {
        WTFLogAlways("WebKit wasn't able to find a WebVTT encoder. Not continuing without platform support for subtitles.");
        return nullptr;
    }

The existence of this check sort of implies the plugin is optional, and expected behavior if missing is to fail gracefully without crashing, right? Whichever strategy is adopted to handle missing GStreamer elements, the code should be consistent. I could be wrong, but I thought the strategy was that we can crash if base elements are missing, since WebKit cannot build without those, but -good or -bad elements use runtime checks since those could be easily forgotten by mistake. If the strategy is to always crash, that's fine too and I'll adjust our packaging.

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