[LAU] I just don't know Jack anymore.

[Ken Restivo]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 09:31:59AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 4:51 AM, Josh Lawrence <hardbop200 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > yes, but firefox, mozilla, iceweasel, emacs, xemacs, lucid emacs, etc.
> > can happily coexist on my system with no problem. ?in fact, I can fire
> > all of them up all at once.
> 
> try that with different versions of an NFS server ....
> 
> > various flavors of jack on the other hand...
> 
> jack is a server plus a library. if the versions don't match, kaboom.
> the other examples are either applications or just libraries. there's
> not a whole lot of *nix software that consists of a server/library
> pair. X11 would be the other canonical example.

Hmm. And I guess postfix/sendmail/exim4/ssmtp would be another, so I see your point. However, with my distro, I can trivially easily switch back and forth between MTA/MUA's, in fact, I just switched between a bunch of them that last week.

Jack/Ardour's allergy to distributions in general (and Debian in particular) has made this harder to manage. If I could go "sudo apt-get install jack-flavor-of-the-month" and it switches over, then go "sudo apt-get install jackd-original" to switch back, then it's no problemo. 

There are also other servers/services like Apache/Nginx/thttpd/lighthttpd, which *can* coexist or even all run simultaneously on a single machine. That might be another model for making the various jacks easier to switch between. I remember some discussion of this many months or years ago, but I don't know how that turned out.

-ken