Re: API freeze release ... status so far.

[Jamin Philip Gray <jpg2 cec wustl edu>]

> > FWIW my personal view is that the whole sound thing in libgnome is
> > pointless, because no one turns sounds on, because we don't have any
> > good sounds. And sounds are annoying even if you have good ones, most
> > people don't them on in Windows either I don't think.
> 
> Having event sounds in libgnome is sort of a "whatever" issue compared
> to picking and running with a media and/or sound API. aRTs is OK, but it
> would seem prudent to eventually add a full media API to the mix (and I
> presume gstreamer can use arts). "Playing movies" is currently one of
> the surprisingly few things a GNOME desktop is completely incompetent at
> that has become a basic part of commercial desktops.

I couldn't agree with you more.  GNOME (and Linux support in general)
for video is abysmal.  GStreamer seems well-architected, though has a
ways to go before it's easy to set up and use the player, IMO.  I've
been demo'ing GNOME recently to friends and co-workers.  Overall
they're quite impressed.  But when they click on the fancy .mpg icon
in Nautilus of course nothing happens because there is no GNOME media
player.  I get comments like "You mean GNOME doesn't have a media
player of any sort?"  On top of that there are various problems with
esd, such as (at least on my system) it not going away when a user
logs out of GNOME which results in other users who subsequently log in
not being able to use esd.  "Why won't xmms play any mp3's?"  or "Why
are my GNOME sound events not working?"  I can understand Havoc's
person preference to not have sounds for events in GNOME, but I do
know a lot of users who love the sounds.  I think the answer is to fix
the problems with the current GNOME media framework (that phrase is
somewhat laughable) rather than ditch media support altogether.

----------------------------------------------------
name:    Jamin Philip Gray
email:   jgray writeme com
icq:     1361499
jabber:  jamin jabber com
web:     http://DoLinux.org/jamin/

Whoever said 'the hand is quicker than the eye' never tried
rolling them down a hill.