Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 08:40 +0100, Amaury Jacquot wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > So I have an alternate proposal for 2.10: just take out esound.
> 
> good call

  I don't think Havoc means to not use esound.  I think he means that
esound can be considered an audio driver, therefore neither polypaudio
nor esound need to be part of the GNOME desktop.

> 
> my take here is that there's no real point in using a sound-server 
> anymore, unless you use some hackish setup with remote workstation & sound.
> may I remind people that esound was included so that multiple 
> application could use the sound device at the same time, function which 
> is now done directly by Alsa, with it's software mixing functionnalities.

  That's not entirely true.  Alsa's dmix is very buggy if your hardware
doesn't actually support multiple channels.  Like, notice the difference
between dmix running on top of one of those builtin AC'97 chips and dmix
on top of a good PCI sound card.  Most likely, sooner or later you'll
have to disable software mixing because some application produces crappy
sound when using it and clean sound without it.  Then you're back to
contention for a single sound device.

> As such, we don't need those network enabled things anymore.

  You do if you want network transparency.  It is not very good to give
it away when it costs so little.  The hard part is taken care by X11, so
why ruin everything by not including sound?

> 
>  >  - what "play sound" API do we want apps to code to?
> 
> that should be gstreamer, right ?

  Unless things changed since last time I saw, gstreamer doesn't have a
simple gnome_play_sound("/usr/share/sounds/foo.wav") API.  And gstreamer
isn't part of developer platform yet.

  But it wouldn't be bad if someone changed the implementation of
gnome_play_sound to use gstreamer instead of esound.  Except that it is
too late for GNOME 2.10.

  Regards.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic