Re: [LAU] Questions about LV2

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:10 AM, David Robillard <d@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> On Wed, 2013-05-15 at 13:01 -0700, J. Liles wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > You've seen the consequences of these design decisions in Rui's
> > response. As extensible and awesome as your design may be on paper,
> > the end result is that users get overly fancy, in consistent (and
> > probably slow) GUIs that fiddle with parameters through hidden
> > channels and have poor accessibility. I think that is a real problem.
>
> Meh, the facility is genuinely useful for certain things. Like anything
> it can be abused, but you can't legislate good programming.
>
> As usual the reality was not a choice between plugins doing the right
> thing, or the wrong thing, right now; but a choice between plugins
> existing whatsoever or not. Mailing list bullshit tends to suggest the
> former is reality, but it is not. Reality check: No user would rather
> simply not have e.g. the JUCE plugins whatsoever. Don't like them?
> Don't use them. Nobody loses anything by plugins existing.
>
> As the incentive to do things correctly increases (e.g. hosts doing
> fancy things, or not supporting instance access at all like Ingen), then
> plugins will move to them. If separation is better, then real-world
> incentive will reflect that, and things will evolve appropriately. It
> won't be the first kludge to die in LV2 land, and it won't be the last.
>
> It is a small problem at this point in evolution, but it's not a design
> problem, it is a simple "work that needs doing" problem.
>
> ... or, in the case of host authors, not-work that needs doing. Don't
> like it? Don't implement it. Plugins that want to work in your host
> will then have to adapt.
>
> A custom UI not working is hardly the end of the world anyway.
>

Fair enough except for the last sentence. The point of this thread is that
for some people, it is at least the end of the road. We're talking about
freshly developed, 100% free software plugins can't function without their
custom GUI. This is not about some legacy thing, or some bridge to JUCE.
This is what has come out of the technology, and I don't expect it to stop.
We'll just end up with a situation where half of LV2 plugins only work in
QTractor and Ardour and users don't really understand why other programs
won't/can't support them.

An API *is* by its nature legislation, David. And when your legislation is
full of loopholes what you end up with is usually very different than what
you originally had in mind.

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Received on Thu May 16 20:15:03 2013