Re: Gnome Sound API (urgent)

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 06Aug2001 01:19AM (+0200), Martin Baulig wrote:
> 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.

Hi Martin,

I don't think that's a very constructive way to approach the
situation. While Michael was indeed pushing very hard for a freeze,
it's worth noting that many of the libraries included in the "API
freeze" release are not in fact completely API frozen. Even libbonobo
and gtk+ have a handful of open API issues as declared by the
maintainers (in the case of libbonobo, to be fair, it is mainly in the
area of IDL files that are mainly used by libbonoboui).

I think rather than just calling libgnome as it is now completely
frozen, it would be good to publish a list of open issues for the
libgnome API. If you don't personally feel like making any of those
changes, then perhaps you could just post the list, call for
volunteers, and say anything else that doesn't get done by some
deadline won't happen. Then people who don't like particular bits of
API would have the chance to change it themselves if sufficiently
motivated.

Regards,

Maciej