[linux-audio-dev] LADSPA BOF LA2004 report

[Steve Harris]

This is a quick report back from the LADSPA bird-of-a-feather session that
happened on Friday morning at the LA Conference. Attendees of the session
can expand on any details that aren't clear here once they recover :)
The atendees signed off on the text that has unanimous agreement, but not
on the open question IIRC.

Date 2004-04-30 10:00
Duration 3:30

Present         11 people (dont have a list of names, sorry)
Users           10
Plugin devels   3
Host devels     6

Unanimous agreement was reached on a number of pointsdditions, these are:

Momentary hint: additional hint (requires toggle) - indicates that control
        (UI) shouldn't latch the control.

Port paths: '/' should be used as a port path component divider. No
	leading slash will be used. This is for grouping related controls
	in UIs and to allow more natural reflection of LADSPA port names
	into OSC or HTTP, for example.

Zero pointer buffer values: if hint bit is set then the buffer pointer can
	be NULL to indicate that the port is not connected.

There will be a LADSPA 2.0 which will differ from the 1.0 series only in
enforcing all metadata to be represented externally. No features over what
was agreed here will be added. Design work will start as soon as the
conference finishes. Estimates for time to completion are on the order of
2 months.

Open Questions

There is the possibility of an interrim 1.2 ladspa.h version that will add
the momentary hint, port paths, zero pointer buffer values and port name
extension enumerations, and will be deprecated by 2.0. It was decided to
leave it to the LADSPA devleoper community to vote if this was
desirable, as there was no consensus.

- Steve