[LAD] State of Plugin API's

[Patrick Shirkey]

On 11/02/2009 05:41 AM, David Robillard wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-11-01 at 11:51 -0600, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
>    
>> On Sun, 1 Nov 2009, David Robillard wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> But nobody needed to define MIDI+MMC and MIDI+MTC and MIDI+MMC1 and MIDI
>>> +MMC2 and MIDI+MMC1+MTC and MIDI+MMC2+MTC and ... for people to make
>>> sense of the whole thing, did they? :)
>>>        
>> Yes and No.  Manufacturers are required to publish their MIDI
>> Implementation so that the person buying the device would know what types
>> of MIDI messages the device sends and responds to.  This includes the
>> summarized table and the down-to-each-sysex-bit documentation.  If you
>> know you want an MMC-capable device, you know to look here.
>>
>> If you don't want to do LV2-EXtremeMakeover-HomeEdition or LV2-El33t, then
>> perhaps a concise table with a standardized format might work better for
>> you.
>>      
> I agree hosts and plugins should provide this information in an easy to
> find place, though doing things properly at runtime makes it less
> necessary than you might think.
>
>    


That's the funny thing about this discussion. I feel that if you say it 
is useful but slightly unnecessary then for a lot of people it will be 
extremely useful :-)

FWIW, I will try to bring this information out in a simple manner on the 
wiki. If anyone has the time to think of a detailed method for handling 
this please share. I will need a more advanced description of how it 
needs to be executed and displayed to implement this quickly.




>> And, oh
>> yeah, we forgot to tell you about the dynparam extension... but I'm sure
>> you'll figure that out when things don't work."
>>      
> The host has all the information needed to report this explicitly to the
> user (you can't use plugin foo because this program doesn't support
> feature bar).  Its not like it's just going to mysteriously not work,
> that's just bad host/UI design.
>    


Is this method clearly defined in the online docs?




Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd