Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] aRts, KDE - say it ain't so!
From: Stefan Westerfeld (stefan_AT_space.twc.de)
Date: ma loka 11 1999 - 18:50:31 EDT
Hi!
On Mon, Oct 11, 1999 at 01:16:05PM -0400, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> > abilities are leagues ahead of anything yet found on Unix. It will
> > offer capabilities to KDE that have so far been found only on OSes
> > like Windows, BeOS, etc.
>
> yes, aRts is great but .... sigh - "offer capabilities to KDE"
>
> Windows, for all its faults, is an OS. BeOS is an OS. KDE is not an
> OS! what is anyone doing "offering capabilities" to the bloody desktop
> architecture. this is *insane*.
What is the OS? Putting it into the linux kernel, excluding every FreeBSD
and Solaris user, and making plugin crashs take down the whole system?
> the work that Stefan has done on aRts is wonderful, but this idea of
> there being a desktop, rather than an OS, that offers these
> capabilities is a dangerous path, and it fractures our community.
Does the idea that there is an X11 server, offering graphics capabilities
to almost any graphic linux application seriously fracture our community?
Have you got an alternative plan for that? I mean: having an audio server
engine is pretty much the same idea, just for audio.
> I am
> not going to run KDE or GNOME for the foreseeable future, and anyone
> who thinks that the way forward is to build functions into either of
> these systems that are not part of the kernel or a standalone program
> is not my friend.
I also think audio technology should *not* depend on the desktop. Since
starting aRts I invested an enormous amount of effort in making it work
with CORBA. If you download it, you'll see that every aRts version since
quite a lot of time comes with the --disable-kde option.
Another thing I invested work into is GUI seperation. That works. You can
write a Gtk+ frontend, or Java, or whatever else.
And if you remember how that topic came onto that list recently: It was
some ongoing discussion on the gnome-kde list, whether or not using aRts
in Gnome would be a good idea as well. So I am open to everything, it's
just that I can't write that Gtk+ stuff and that Qt stuff and maintain
the CORBA things and integrate with KDE2 and everything.
If you want it in Gnome, just do it, I'll help. If you want to use it
without desktop, just do that. If you want to use it without X11, you
can. If you want it without Linux, you can. And if you are really bored,
you can even try to get it running under NT.
For KDE2 we are working on things like KApplication::play to play a sample
so that everybody can use it really easily. Or for instance KAudioStream
which will about be the same as esd offers through their streaming
record/play API, but easier to use for KDE users, since integrated with
Qt signals&slots. However the aRts core won't depend on Qt, nor on KDE,
and I'll try to put as many lines of code in the common core as possible.
Cu... Stefan
--
-* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan_AT_space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-
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