Future of esound

[Richard Boulton <rjb37 cam ac uk>]

Hi all,

I've been looking at esound for a while now, and am in the middle of
writing some documentation for it.  While it's not currently perfect, it's
working quite nicely for me, and looks to me to be possible to make into a
nicely rounded and effective package given an appropriate amount of
development and work cleaning up rough edges.

I notice that there appear to be moves to create either a replacement or a
competitor package though (viz, comments which have been made to me, and
the creation of audion) - if this is going to happen I'd like to know as
soon as reasonably possible so that I don't waste my time working on a
dead duck.

While a replacement _might_ be a very good idea, it seems a shame to
burden all the application developers who've been merrily adding esound
support with yet another audio system to support unless it's absolutely
neccessary.

I'd be incredibly grateful if someone who knows could comment about what
gnome's plans are (likely to be), and what the thinking behind replacing
esound is.

While I'm at it, can I suggest that any replacement should at least think
of providing a "backwards" compatible API for applications which have had
esound support added already?  Though given that the esound API is marked
as in development, maybe this is unreasonable...

Thanks in advance,
--Richard