[Klug-general] Linux Sound Programming

[Graham Todd]

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On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:30:48 +0000
George Prowse <george.prowse at gmail.com> uttered these words:

> > PULSE and JACK don't work well together because they're designed for
> > different things.  
> 
> All of them, with perhaps the exception of ALSA seems like it was 
> dreampt up in someone's potting shed as an answer to a problem that 
> never should have existed.

Maybe not, but they do exist, mainly because other OS insist on using
proprietary codecs and we members of the Linux community say those
codecs should have been free to use and incorporate into our software.
And hardware manufacturers should make it easier for us to use their
hardware with our operating system of choice.

> All these fractions of applications are killing linux, you also have 
> people deluding themselves that more is better when in reality having 
> 150 different ways of doing things just complicates matters.

Its called choice, but apart from that, most distros have a standard
piece of software for sound reproduction, so in practice most people do
*not* encounter "150 different ways of doing things".  It only happens
when they are trying to fix a specific problem, and then the choice
works in their favour.

> Look at all the successful standards, everything from network naming
> to HTML, and it is all governed by one standard which it worked out
> by those most qualified to do it. If people want to add extra stuff
> to their work that isn't in the standard then they are free to do
> that but there is always the base.

The problem is that standards - those adopted by the organisations of
experts - are not always accepted in modern use as "standards".  The
HTML which Microsoft is always trying to foist on us is not the same in
every case as the HTML standard set down by the W3C, yet people regard
it as standard; the document format adopted by the International
Standards Organisation (the OpenDocument format) is virtually unknown
in the world of Windows, where the .doc format is supposed to be the
standard (even though it seems to change with every edition of Word).
These are *not* standards merely because they are used by the majority
of software users.

If it was as simple as having a standard on which everyone agreed and
would be able to be supported by virtually all software, there'd be no
problem.  However, we in the Linux community are coming up against a
restriction of access to the source code and the lack of adoption of
pure standards and these militate against the adoption of something
which is in general use, being automatically adopted for use within the
free software community.
 
> Heh, base. That could so easily lead my rant round to the LSB. And 
> abstraction. What is the obsession every coder seems to have with 
> abstraction? If you want smaller binaries DON'T USE GCC!!!

Seriously, I'd like to hear your rant on the LSB (assuming by that you
mean the Linux Standards Base and not the London and Scottish Bank), as
its avowed aim is:

> The goal of the LSB is to develop and promote a set of open standards
> that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable
> software applications to run on any compliant system even in binary
> form. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit
> software vendors to port and write products for Linux Operating
> System.

Now that seems pretty sensible to me, so I wonder what your objections
could be....  The same goes for the GCC. In a world where we don't have
accepted standards between all operating systems, the best we can hope
for is agreed standards between open operating systems.

- -- 
Graham Todd
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