Re: First release of MAS available

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

> > Which two interfaces are you referring to that you think would need to be
> > maintained?
> 
> I get the feeling that you are arguing the case of "if there was one 
> really good audio server, we would all be using it and there would only be 
> One True Interface".

No, I'm saying "the solution to people disagreeing is not to avoid making
a decision". People are never going to agree on one really good audio
server, but putting time into trying to accomodate disagreement by being
configurable does not advance the technology - it's just not productive.
At some point you have to decide on one that will be the best solution for
the majority, and go with it, and ignore the whining.

> I use Red Hat, which of course is a system you know, and Red Hat, as far 
> as I can make out, uses OSS by default.  While, if I understand correctly, 
> you still argue for EsounD in it's current form.

I don't have any love for esound, it just works well enough to not be
worth the cost of replacing it with the other similarly bad
alternatives...

> I'm not convinced by your argument that promotes the "choose one and stick 
> to it" if it's obvious that people like you and me, who have a pretty good 
> idea about the pro's and con's, in their actual daily usage have two 
> conflicting output systems out of the box already.  My Gnome theoretically 
> would be using esd, but my system comes with OSS.

They don't conflict, though.

> So, to answer your question : we're at least thinking about two different 
> interfaces at the very least already, OSS and EsounD.

> > 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).
> 
> ... so, as I've said, Gnome already has support for multiple sound 
> systems.  It might not be important, but it is the case right now.

No, libgnome* uses esound for everything, and does not talk OSS directly.  
esound is the (unfortunately) current sound hardware abstraction...

> No problem.  I respect your point of view.  I hold Iain's in slightly
> higher regard because he actually coded an application with it though
> and experienced the advantages.  As I've said, it'll be the app
> developers who decide in the end, not the people commenting from the
> side of the road.
>
> This isn't meant derogatory

If you're going to call me a backseat driver, just go ahead and do it, I
can deal. ;-)

The advantages/disadvantages being talked about here aren't at the
application development level, because nothing being discussed is exposed
to the application developers at all. This is a question of internal Gnome
architecture, not what application developers should use for most media
handling (a function which we all agree gstreamer should perform).

-- Elliot