Re: First release of MAS available

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 15:15, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 13:49, Elliot Lee wrote:
> > On 24 Jan 2003, iain wrote:
> > 
> > > fre, 2003-01-24 kl. 13:09 skrev Elliot Lee:
> > > 
> > > > What reasons do you see making important to use gstreamer from all gnome
> > > > apps to generate the sound events?
> > > 
> > > Because the whole linux world is never going to standardise on one sound
> > > server, just like we can't standardise on one toolkit.
> > 
> > If that's your reason for going with gstreamer, you can't keep sticking
> > your head in the sand and adding more and more layers to handle every
> > possible disagreement. Make a sound server choice, stick with it, and cope
> > with the fact that some people might disagree. Supporting all the choices
> > doesn't bring consensus any closer.
> > 
> > (This is in the context of Gnome-in-general apps, not gstreamer, where
> > special use cases occur that indeed might need to be handled by different
> > sound servers.)
> > 
> > > I don't need a sound server, my sound card can do everything I need by
> > > itself.
> > 
> > The only thing Gnome-in-general needs the sound server for is sound
> > events. You need sound samples for sound events. Your sound card can't do
> > that. The sound server does it best.
> > 
> > > As for the "missing features", yes, we come to the lowest common
> > > denominator, but just like with gtk you used (still are) able to get the
> > > XWindow from a GdkWindow and do things at a more low level you can do
> > > them with GStreamer as well.
> > 
> > Yes, but if libgnome* just uses gstreamer to get to the point where it can
> > talk to the sound server API directly, there is really no point in using
> > gstreamer at all, because the direct dependency on the sound server API
> > will exist anyways.
> 
> So, if I understand well, in libgnome we would have the same simple API
> we have, with MAS as the direct backend (probably with audiofile as the
> loading backend, because the core mas can't play any files, ie. no
> plugins). And for the multimedia applications, we'd have a MAS output
> through Gstreamer.
> 
> If I read that well, I will have to agree with Elliott.

Yes, if we want to ship a sound server and insist on people using it then I guess 
this is a good solution. But going with the all-gstreamer option would let us offer
people to run all of gnome without a soundserver or offer for instance KDE people to run 
all GNOME applications with artsd.

Christian