[linux-audio-dev] Todays changes to "LADSPA2" strawman

[Chris Cannam]

I haven't posted to this thread yet, for a couple of reasons besides the 
usual lack of time.

One reason is that on a technical level I don't have any argument with 
most of what Steve says.  Removing descriptive data from the plugin I 
think is a good principle.  I'm not fond of this Turtle format, it is 
complicated and I don't find it easily "visually parseable" but it's 
still better than XML RDF, and so long as you can easily hack someone 
else's .ttl file to make your own, it probably isn't much of an issue.
Technically it all looks pretty much OK.

But the other reason is that I don't find much to make me care about the 
outcome at this stage.  This may be a technically better way to design 
a LADSPA-like plugin API, but until it offers something significantly 
more useful than LADSPA, that's rather irrelevant to anyone outside 
this thread.  A LADSPA 2 that is the same as LADSPA 1, "technically 
superior" but incompatible will probably fail.  Authors of existing 
hosts won't want the trouble; plugin authors will put up with the 
potential extra work of doing LADSPA 1 to get better host coverage.  So 
the aim is to do more interesting things with it afterwards.  But what?

We want to avoid ending up with LADSPA, DSSI, and "LADSPA2", with the 
latter two being incompatible overlapping extensions of the first.  
That would be very impractical for authors of plugins that might want 
features from both of the extended APIs.  I think we want to avoid 
having LADSPA, DSSI, "LADSPA2" and "DSSI2" as well; the menu is 
complicated enough already, for anyone reading it for the first time.  
This format is really going to have to aim to grow into something that 
can replace DSSI as well.  And while that could be great, it's a much 
more snaggly business -- DSSI has turned out pretty complicated, for 
some very sound reasons, and that has already helped it to be less 
popular than we'd hoped.  If it was obvious that we could simplify it a 
lot the "LADSPA2" way, that would be great, but I don't see at first 
glance that it is.

So, I wouldn't mind hearing some thoughts on what this rewrite might 
ultimately be for.


Chris