[linux-audio-dev] PTAF link and comments

[Paul Davis]

>I think LAD people wants to enforce this because of the limitations of the
>XWindow system which is a bad reason. The good way of doing this is to FIX

its not to do with limitations of XWindow. in fact, the most positive
reason has to do with the most notable feature set of XWindow: total
network transparency. as steve has already noted, its easy to come up
with scenarios (well, once you leave the home studio behind) where you
want to run the GUI on a different display than the one attached to
the host where the DSP is running.

>the toolkit so that they can coexist gracefully. Motif allready provides an
>API for other toolkits to hook into the event system, the others should
>start doing the same. 

i don't think you understand this point deeply enough (that's OK: most
people don't). all the toolkits do what Motif does. what none of them
do (or do well enough) is to be able to take advantage of the presence
of these hooks. GTK offers way to let Qt hook into the event loop, but
Qt can't use them. Qt offers GTK the same, but GTK can't really use
them. etc. etc.

>		       Isn't it what opensource is all about: taking the time
>to fix wrong designs instead of rushing the apps out of the door to satisfiy
>short term customers? Apple had the exact same problem in the classic API:
>the event management was totaly centralised inside an application, and they
>fixed it when developping Carbon. If even apple can fix their wrong designs,
>everybody can :-).

well, there is a bit of a problem here. nobody but us chickens (people
writing shared objects with their own somewhat independent GUIs)
notices this problem. it doesn't affect traditional applications, and
it doesn't affect the more traditional "plugin" systems that don't
come with per-plugin GUIs. there is very, very, very little pressure
on the developers of toolkits to fix this problem.

>XML + Scripting language is very nice but not flexible enough.

you might be suprised to know that i agree with you :) thats partly
why i wrote LCP (the LADSPA Control Protocol), and am adding support
for it to Ardour as we speak. it doesn't avoid the IPC you fear
between the GUI and the DSP code, but it does allow plugin authors to
create GUIs using whatever tools they want to.

--p