[LAD] [ann] CAPS 0.4.5

[David Robillard]

On Sun, 2011-04-17 at 19:16 +0100, Chris Cannam wrote:
> On 17 April 2011 18:12, David Robillard <d at drobilla.net> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 11:59 +0100, Chris Cannam wrote:
> >> I like to disagree with David on most things LADSPA -- for example I
> >> think a host that uses the "unique" ID at all is broken from the
> >> outset
> >
> > Well, that's just silly... it's the only ID there is. What else would
> > they use?
> 
> Library name plus label, for example.  My hosts do that and have done
> for years.  Not ideal either of course, but at least it doesn't
> completely stuff up any situation where a numerical ID can't be
> generated in advance (dssi-vst, etc).

That is not guaranteed to be unique, and I know of at least one case in
practise where it isn't (various blop packages have a different library
name).  There's no reason whatsoever the library name and label of
various LADSPA plugin distributions can't be completely different,
neither one is an ID.

Of course, the numeric IDs are screwed up for a few plugins in reality
as well, but at least that is actually defined to be an ID (therefore
those plugins are broken).

Perhaps the LADSPA spec /should/ use that (or whatever else) as an
identifier, but it doesn't.  It is an extremely bad idea to pretend a
spec says what you wish it did and implement that instead of what the
spec actually says.

I know because I blindly heeded this advice in the past, and it screwed
me :).  Please don't advise people that this is what a LADSPA
implementation should do...

-dr