[Jack-Devel] Client-Server models are just fine. Please?

Hi *! Funny to see the recent activity prompted by Paul's step-down notice. I'm a bit worried to see this flurry of fundamental design discussions about putting everything into some magical lib and whatnot. Client-server thinking is a fundamental prerequisite for keeping one's sanity when using UNIX (and Mac OS X, for that matter), and it even benefits Windows users. Client-server architecture is good. It works. Nothing against automating things, but if your user-friendly application feels it must spawn a jack server for me, it needs to do all of the following: * pop open a notice to the effect that no jack server has been found and does the user want you to do that for her/him? together with a checkbox to not ask again and a notice on how to undo the "don't ask again". * spawn a jackd server and explain to the user how it guessed what configuration to use and how to change that. also point out to the user how to see/modify jack connections with jack_lsp/jack_connect (because they will always be present on any system that has jack) and of course point to user-friendly tools such as JackPilot, qjackctl, or patchage. also tell the user how to access jackd error messages. no votes for implicit magic without being obvious about what's being done. good example of how not to do magic (no systemd bashing here, plz, it's just an example!): i use cd ripping tool "asunder" and tell it to log to /var/log/asunder.log because i suspect hardware failure of a dvdrw drive. no log ever appears. days later, i look through the system journal and see that it has incorporated the asunder log messages. either asunder logs to syslog anyways and hasn't updated its gui to reflect it (then i don't have a case here), or journald has some magic to catch any attempt to start a log in /var/log and reroutes it to the global log. if the latter, then the user-friendly way to do it is to write a stub /var/log/asunder.log that contains a note as to what has happened to the log and where the information is to be found. again: no implicitism without making it obvious what is happening for old people who still think everything is a file. i still think the best way to make jack user-friendly is to quickly educate users how to start a graphical jack config and patching tool, and then start their app. this is the free software community. unless we want to make all our hangouts on IRC, mailing lists, and forums uninhabitable, we MUST NOT DUMB DOWN OUR NEW USERS, and what's worse, annoy old and experienced ones! be friendly, yes, by all means. hide the underlying workings from users and prevent them from understanding them, never. just my few cents, Jörn -- Jörn Nettingsmeier Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487 Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio) Tonmeister VDT http://stackingdwarves.net