10 Aug
2009
10 Aug
'09
8:49 a.m.
On 10 Aug 2009, at 10:41, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 10:26:34AM +0200, Jörn
Nettingsmeier wrote:
Sure. The original intention was that LV2 1.x would "bless" certain
extensions as being required for that version, but that's not been
necessary so far.
from a design standpoint, i totally agree with
all your points, and
what
little i've so far grokked of lv2 looks very nice indeed. *but*:
it's a
moving target, and few host authors have committed themselves to
implement those extensions.
the problem i see: the extensions mentioned on the lv2 website are of
very different maturity, it's absolutely not clear which of those
should
be considered "canonical" and hence a *must-implement* feature, nor
has
there been any public discussion about any canonical set of core
extensions (excuse that weird expression, but i can't think of
anything
better).
crooked analogy alert... as it is now, lv2
resembles XML: you can do
anything in principle, but there is almost no common semantics. we
should move it to XHTML: define a set of mandatory extensions that
everybody can expect to work pretty much everywhere (to the extent
that
it makes sense - i understand a synth host might have different
priorities than, say, ardour).
The evolutive process described and advocated by Dave is
certainly one that can work - it is the way e.g. natural
languages get defined and change over time. It's also why
they tend to be inconsistent and why you need to study a
lot more grammar than would be required otherwise. This should be compared to the (in most cases) quite
consistent syntax of computer programming languages.
And in the end, a plugin interface is a language that
has to be understood by both the host and the plugin.
Or at least some of it does. There are some (many?) cases where a
plugin is still fully usable by the host, even if it doesn't
comprehend the extension. Port groups is an example of this.
- Steve