Re: sound and gnome ?

[Michael Fulbright <msf redhat com>]

On 30 Jan 1998, Tom Tromey wrote:

> DrMike> The initial goal needs to be designing the gnome API so gnome
> DrMike> apps are independent of the hw layer we use.
> 
> Yeah.  But arguably that is what something like NAS provides, right?
> It is precisely an API that is independent of the hardware (and
> network).
> 
> Do we really need another abstraction layer on top of this?  I can see
> that we might want one if we were really unsure of which protocol we
> wanted to use, or if we wanted to support several protocols.  I don't
> know if either of these is the case.
> 
> 

I think I was leaning to the side of caution and suggesting we put
almost a stub layer on top of whatever we use under Linux (NAS perhaps)
so that 1) all the GNOME apps dont have to be rewritten when we
decide NAS is broken down the line, and 2) it will be easier to
get GNOME working on a platform that doesn't use whatever sound
system we chose (like NAS).

We're stuck using something like NAS because the current Linux
sound drivers in the kernel don't do the mixing for us. Alan Cox
gave me the impression we shouldn't expect this to appear in
the kernel in the future, though I could be mistaken. And NAS
would provide a way to do sound over a network, which is interesting.

But I don't know if NAS will handle the real-time multimedia type
applications, like RealVideo stream, mpeg video, etc. Perhaps it
can be made to work - but until we're sure I recomend we hide
it from our GNOME apps so we can change to something else later and
the GNOME apps will still work fine.

I am making sense, or am I being overly caution?


> 
> I think we should view the event manager as a low-level bus.  It
> accepts events, and then redistributes them to the objects that have
> registered an interest.  I think the event manager shouldn't have any
> direct knowledge of sound, because it is a generic service that will
> be used for other things.
> 

Agreed 100%, I like the way you described this very much.


Dr Mike
msf@redhat.com