Re: First release of MAS available

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

 On 24 Jan 2003, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:

> 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.

gnome-ding may not need to support all those other sound servers, just the
OS-level interfaces.

> If everyne used GStreamer then only GStreamer would need these
> drivers/plugins.

If everyone used gstreamer-on-MAS, then gstreamer would not need those
other drivers/plugins. :)

> 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.

Maybe part of the problem is that the "our users" you are thinking of are
not representative of the typical person who will be using Gnome for
various audio things?

> 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. 

Good to hear.

> > 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)

This doesn't sound likely, since a control panel would be needed to 
configure the sound events.

> > 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 :)

Perhaps my confusion is over what the issue is - I'm talking about only
what Gnome-in-general uses via libgnome for sound events, and what Gnome
The Project recommends as an audio abstraction for apps that need a
sound-specific API. Sound events are actually somewhat important, even
though you & I may not use them.

I'm not talking about the API for Gnome apps that have general media
handling needs - we all agree that is gstreamer.

-- Elliot