Re: Gnome Sound API (urgent)

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Hi Owen,

well, there's a simple answer to all your questions:

gnome-sound.[ch] is the API frozen sound API which we'll use for GNOME 2.0,
it's a wrapper around CSL - so if you have questions about it or don't
understand what it does, look at how CSL does it.

If it's not perfect or doesn't work - well, that's life - now we need to
live with it until the next API incompatible release. I'm sorry but any
discussions about this API are pointless - it's what we're going to use
for GNOME 2.0.

I said more than once that I'm not happy with the current libgnome API and
that I don't want to freeze it at the current point. I wanted to wait at
least two weeks before we freeze libgnome so that we can discuss this stuff.

Unfortunately, this was not wanted and people urged me to freeze libgnome as
soon as possible. So I spent all of Friday to make a GNOME sound API which
wraps CSL but which doesn't require all apps to link against CSL. I had no
time to met any other API constraints or to do any discussion about it.

So you guys can now call yourself happy since you have your frozen
libgnome-1.100.0.tar.gz which you wanted to have that urgently.

The sound API works just fine since it's a 1:1 mapping of the corresponding
CSL functions - it just doesn't require all apps to link against CSL. It's
nothing more.

And gnome-triggers.[ch] is what we had in GNOME 1.x.

I also don't see any point in doing any disussion about this API - nobody
was really interested in hacking on libgnome so far, nobody raised any
concerns about any piece of API in it - all that people wanted was a frozen
tarball as quickly as possible. So I consider libgnome a dead module - which
we just need to preserve due to compatibility with GNOME 1.x - and we had
sound in GNOME 1.x.

Same for libgnomeui - nobody except me ever did any substantial changes to
it - so I make myself the life easy and call what's now in libgnomeui CVS
the frozen API for GNOME 2.0.

To summarize, the libgnome-1.100.0.tar.gz and what's now in libgnomeui CVS is
what we'll use for the final GNOME 2.0 release. I know that it sucks, but I
also know that I only have 6 weeks of hacking time left - and I don't want to
spend 2 of them to hack on dead code.

I feel like my time can be used much better if I help to port some large
application like the Panel or Nautilus to GNOME 2.0 - these are things which
benefit a very large number of our users - and there's still a lot of work to
be done.

If libgnome and libgnomeui are not dead, then this mail will hopefully wake
up all those of you who're just sitting there and hoping that everything will
turn out right. All I can do at the moment is to make the best use of my time
and at the moment I feel like libgnome(ui) will be dead on Sep 16th - so I
better hack on something else.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)