Re: First release of MAS available

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 14:54, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On 24 Jan 2003, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> 
> > > Will cause tons of circular dependencies, much pain, and unnecessary
> > > bloat.
> >
> > What circular dependencies? gnome apps depend on gstreamer core, only
> > gstreamer MAS plugin depens on MAS.
> 
> I was wrong there.
> 
> > > gstreamer is a media framework, not a sound server. Gnome-in-general needs
> > > only a sound server, not a media framework, and IIRC media frameworks such
> > > as gstreamer are missing features necessary to adopt them as replacements
> > > for the sound server functionality that esound provides.
> >
> > Well the question is if asking apps to depend on gstreamer is a lesser evil 
> > than needing to maintain two sets of sounds system interfaces.
> 
> Which two interfaces are you referring to that you think would need to be
> maintained?

You touch on this further down in the mail, but to summarize I meant
that your gnome-ding system (esd, MAS) and gstreamer both would need to
have support for OSS, ALSA, MAS, ESD, ARTSD, JACK, SUN Audio, HP Audio,
IRIX audio etc. If everyne used GStreamer then only GStreamer would need
these drivers/plugins.

> > > What reasons do you see making important to use gstreamer from all gnome
> > > apps to generate the sound events?
> > One place to maintain support for sound systems
> > and one place of sound system configuration would be my major arguments.
> 
> Although gstreamer may be different, for Gnome, it's not important to be
> able to have configurable support for multiple sound systems, only to
> integrate well with one good one (hopefully MAS).
I can understand that argument from a Red Hat distribution maker point
of view. Yet I dare claim that a large base of our users would probably
prefer a solution that lets them chose direct ALSA output for instance
when running locally.

> Also, if the gstreamer solution makes sense, it makes sense whether or not
> MAS is useful.
Agreed, but if MAS means there finally is a good soundserver out there,
then MAS makes the issue more urgent.


> Also, depending on gstreamer will may introduce portability issues for 
> Gnome, due to cothreads. Will it?
In latest GStreamer we introduce a new non-cothreads scheduler called 'opt'. 
We didn't dare make it the default for 0.6.0 due to it being so new, but
I guess that for the 0.7.x series it will be the default.

Also with Brian Cameron now looking into cothread issues on Solaris we
will get some valuable input on how portable/non-portable cothreads
truly is. 


> Also, we will need sound server-specific configuration in Gnome whether or
> not gstreamer is used (to control startup and things like that).
True, but I think that in the case of MAS we could probably just use their own 
gtk+ 2.based apps (see screenshot in my first mail)
> I think we both agree that simpler is better, I'm just not seeing using 
> the gstreamer layer as helping simplicity at all,
Personally I have not used ding sounds on my desktop for the last 4
years, so it is not a core issue for me. As long as my audio and video
related apps use gstreamer and lets me select sound & video system
through that I am happy :)


-- 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>