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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes:
> > 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.
> 
> If we plan to release a GStreamer-based media player with GNOME as an
> application for 2.0, it seems reasonable to include it in the official
> libraries.
> 

What I'm saying is - the only reason Martin has to force a decision
today is that libgnome needs to play annoying bleep sounds when you
open a menu. ;-)

It is stupid to make a potentially wrong major architectural decision 
for this reason. So I think we should just separate the issues; what
Martin picks to play libgnome bleeps need not be the same as our
longer-term media framework or whatever.

Picking a long-term sound API before any of them are ready, or before
we really do a thorough and sane evaluation of the available options,
is IMHO utterly braindamaged. So let's limit the short-term decision
to libgnome bleeps.

When someone wants to do the work of actually evaluating and writing
up the issues so that we can make a decision, we can make one. 

I think we should have two ways to make a decision:

 - RFP-like process where someone really does a lot of homework 
   and presents the issues at some length, and we sort it out 
   carefully
 - "de facto" process where something just turns out to be standard
   after a while, because it's relatively mature and everything 
   else isn't

I think in no case should we randomly "pick something" - It doesn't do
anything except screw us over.

None of this being relevant to the present decision, that's up to Martin.

Havoc