Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 11:57 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> 
>  * polypaudio
> 
> There wasn't an obvious consensus to add polypaudio (or even remove esd), so
> we're stuck with the status quo for yet another release. Hopefully if the
> planned HAL integration work is done for 2.12, we may have some chance of
> convincing the policy-scared. ;-)
> 

What is the value of policy here? What specific problem are you trying
to solve?

I think I agree with Colin. On reasonable platforms this feature is
considered "the audio driver." Are we going to include ALSA too?

The question is where our abstraction layer for the platform-specific
audio driver lives. Since we already ship gstreamer and gstreamer
already abstracts this, what is the problem with using gstreamer as the
cross-platform audio driver wrapper?

So I have an alternate proposal for 2.10: just take out esound.

But whether you agree or not, I would frame the "problem to solve" as:

 - what "play sound" API do we want apps to code to?

*That* is where we need policy. So if polypaudio is the API, then yes we
need to include it. But if gstreamer is the API, then policy on the
sound driver/server/output-device adds nothing.

If you're looking to solve a different problem, then spelling out what
it is is probably the first step to convincing people it's important.

Havoc