Re: GNOME Sound Server, was Re: GNOME sounds - which component

["Mark R. Bowyer" <Moredhel earthling net>]

>From: sopwith@redhat.com (Elliot Lee)
>On 23 Jul 1999 05:26:24 -0400, Mark R. Bowyer <Moredhel@earthling.net> wrote:
>>
>>:
>>There's a *lot* of code about that already supports ESound.  You want all 
>>those projects to recode?
>
>They will be given the option of not doing so. We will support the esound
>API with a wrapper.

A wrapper would certainly help a lot =O)

>>What's so bad about version 0.28 of Esound that can't be fixed by version 1.0?  
>>If you want to code, why can't you just submit patches?
>
>I and various other GNOME hackers been maintaining esound, since the
>"maintainer" last was seen committing on February 20, 1999 and is now
>totally unreachable.

This I wasn't aware of, though I'd been following the ChangeLog and had noticed 
very little activity.  I paid particular attention as I was waiting for the 
-Endian problems to be fixed again, as I use all this on Solaris/SPARC, too.

>I agree with your sentiment of reusing existing functionality, but in this
>case the sentiment is misguided. I daresay you haven't actually looked at
>the libesd API or the esound code...

I have actually, in trying to figure out the aforementioned -endian problems 
that made it fail consistently on SPARC with 16-bit WAVs (as used by Gnome and 
Enlightenment, unfortunately).  The fact that I could make neither head nor tail 
of the code sufficiently to fix it myself I suppose I should have taken as a 
sign ;O)

>Hope this explains it,

Does indeed.  The inclusion of a wrapper, and the building of a good API with 
complete inter-host sound and streaming is much needed.  Please make sure you 
keep to one of the main plus-points of esound though - keep it completely 
compatible with other Unixen too?  This sort of functionality is needed on 
Solaris and it's ilk too, and it would be a shame to have them all end up 
incompatible, when X has done so much to keep them all together =OZ  Maybe take 
a look at the Java Sound APIs while you work on this? ;O)

Ta,

-------My opinion - Not sane, intelligent or necessarily useful-------
o o                                      mailto:Moredhel@earthling.net 
/v\ark R. Bowyer.  http://i.am/Moredhel  mailto:Mark.Bowyer@UK.Sun.COM
`-'         "Everything is true, for a given value of 'true'" - PTerry