[LAD] State of Plugin API's

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

David Robillard wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-11-01 at 01:11 +0100, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
>> as a standard, lv2 is ages behind ladspa, 

> "Core" LV2 is more powerful than LADSPA.  In addition, there's other
> features you can use.  Saying this is ages behind LADSPA makes no sense
> whatsoever.

dave, "powerful" is about engineering quality. a standard (even if it is
shoddily engineered) is good if i can adhere to it and be sure my stuff
will work somewhere else.

these issues are *orthogonal*. don't pee your pants, i'm not criticising
the engineering part.

what makes a standard successful is *market* *penetration* - everybody
and their grandma implements ladspa because it's simple. implementing
lv2 is harder. there are good reasons for it - it's better in every
respect, except in uptake. there is an entrance barrier to it. you can
ignore it and piss off people who point it out, but that's not going to
remove it.

> I don't think your "mission critical" statement is true at all.  GUIs,
> presets, most port types, can all easily gracefully degrade.  Calling
> these "well-crafted" examples is a bit of a stretch.  Where are your
> well crafted examples? ;)

ardour and other hosts frequently exploding in the presence of
yet-unbeknownst lv2 features?
yeah, in theory, they shouldn't do that :)

or try to make sense of the swh gate plugin in the absence of
epp:logarithmic...

> The mechanism, for the 9 billionth time, has nothing to do
> with this.  You are assuming that the whole thing is just so dreadfully
> complex to use in order to make this argument, which is not true.

i'm not talking about mechanism. the mechanism is fine. i'm talking
about the politics of getting a usable standard out there.

the increased power of lv2 comes at the cost of greater complexity,
which in return slows down the adoption.

>> don't give me that M$ FUD shit, either. heck, i've been doing more linux
>> audio advocacy in my life than is good for me, and i really don't see
>> why you're perceiving a little provocative discourse as some sort of
>> intrigue from evil incarnate. just relax.
>>
>> that said, i hope you know i appreciate and respect the work that went
>> into lv2. hence,
> 
> No personal ill-will.  I'm plenty relaxed, but somebody has to set the
> record straight of the constant stream of misleading LV2 slander you're
> pumping out.
> If it's not obvious, this kind of thing irks me because
> your arguments are completely false and ridiculous, dripping with
> fallacy and hand waving and all the other infuriating things about
> people being stupid on the internet.  That /is/ evil incarnate ;)

your definition of "plenty relaxed" seems to differ from mine quite
substantially :-D

the "standard" aspect of lv2 is not done yet. which is plainly evident
from the fact that most innovative lv2 plugins that show up require
patches to the host in order to work - it's not clear to host writers
what they should implement, and plugin writers can't assume what will
work in any given host. until that changes, lv2 is not a successful
standard.
and it takes other skills that software engineering to change that,
which you seem to be a) unwilling to acknowledge and b) lacking.

hence, i'd better give up now. how a person with arguably twice my iq
can so painstakingly kepp missing the point i was trying to make is
mystifying. but it seems pretty pointless to rehash it all over.