Re: gnome-sound

["Mark R. Bowyer" <Moredhel earthling net>]

>From: ERDI Gergo <cactus@telnet.hu>

>I never quite understood why EsounD was developed in the first place. THis
>is a reinvention of the wheel (see NAS) and a misplaced feature (mixing
>sound channels belongs to the kernel) wrapped in one package. Actually, it
>looks like another instance of having an idea and hacking together an
>implementation without looking around for features or sitting down and
>designing it; in other words, it looks like your average late '90's free
>software solution.


HeeeeLLLOoooooo Mr. Cynic. =O)

OK, I was on this list and E-Develop when Ric'Dude announced esd.  Can't 
remember which one he announced it on, but it may have been before Gnome got to 
0.9.something (which is when I started working with it on Solaris), so possibly 
the e-develop list.

All he did was say,paraphrased, was "Hey, I've made this, it's kinda 
cross-platform and it does different sound formats and caches them, so it's like 
the imlib of sound.  Use it if you like it."

Both the Enlightenment and Gnome development teams looked at it, liked it, and 
hard-wired it into their products.  So I suppose that none of them agreed with 
your above comments back then.  Or at least *didn't* before Raster left RedHat 
and the Gnome/Enlightenment Rift opened up =O(

It has problems, but it lifted the whole issue of different sound formats, sound 
cacheing, network awareness and cross-platform sound devices off the developers 
of the other products and let them get on with doing the fun stuff.  The libesd 
API really simplifies the whole process of getting event sounds to work, and the 
caching means they happen with the event, and not 3 seconds later.

So don't just knock it as not being useful - it was, and almost certainly still 
is.

---------My opinion - Not sane, intelligent or necessarily useful---------
o o                                          mailto:Moredhel@earthling.net 
/v\ark R. Bowyer.    http://Moredhel.i.am    mailto:Mark.Bowyer@UK.Sun.COM
`-'  "Micro$oft have performed an illegal operation and will be shut down"