[LAU] Jack, Ardour, and the Gentoo Pro-Audio Overlay

[Brent Busby]

Before going further...I have read the FAQ.

Over the past couple of months, I have been settling into a very nice 
new AMD quad core machine with Gentoo/amd64.  Generally, I've been 
extremely pleased with Gentoo, and I plan on staying on this OS.


One question I have which is not entirely Gentoo-specific regards 
DBUS-aware Jack versus regular Jack (and other various Jacks):

 	Since my system has been compiled to have absolutely no 
PulseAudio whatsoever, do I need DBus support for Jack at all?  From 
what I've gathered from threads here, the only thing DBus support is 
used for in Jack is as part of some mechanisms of trying to tell 
PulseAudio when to pull out of the way (via DBus).  There are USE flags 
of 'classic' and 'dbus' available for the live ebuild of Jack in the 
Pro-Audio overlay...although if 'classic' means no DBus, I'd presume 
you'd get that by just turning the 'dbus' knob off, so I'm not sure what 
'classic' does.  It's not described.

Is there any disadvantage to Jack-DBus?  What about Jack-Midi?  I've 
always dealt with my MIDI hardware using regular Alsa Midi, and I've 
seen messages suggesting Jack-Midi support is not necessary.


Also, I'm new to the whole live ebuilds thing.  I see that the overlay 
offers Ardour, Jack, and many other things in the form of direct CVS 
snapshots.  It seems that these are prefered, however, it looks like 
they often require unmasked versions of dependency programs.  Should I 
be afraid of that?  For example, the live ebuild for Ardour seems to be 
trying to pull in a version of aubio that is masked for amd64, though I 
didn't see a bug in the bug database explaining why.  Should I simply 
unmask any package that is demanded of a program in the overlay on the 
basis that overlay programs are basically bleeding edge anyway?


-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky