14 May
2004
14 May
'04
8:32 p.m.
On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 02:21:46PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
fons - i wasn't talking about xrm at all. i was referring to the way
that X encapulsates the X protocol in Xlib, and nobody ever deals with
the protocol itself. The protocol is the true definition of X, but
nobody uses it, and with good reason.
OK, good example. But I'm straining myself to find a second one.
And X is something immensely more complicated than a plugin description.
Also, there is not one X client lib but lots of them, and nobody could stop
me if I were foolish enough to write my own...
There's maybe a 'political' motivation behind my point of vieuw: forcing
application writers to use a library to access an otherwise undocumented
interface reminds me too much of some commercial practices that I dislike.
I really feel this goes against the spirit of any open source project.
There is a protocol involved in server/client communication. Its
isomorphous to a file format.
OK, I see your point. But this is really a protocol that is internal
to JACK and the way JACK is implemented. In the LADSPA context, we are
talking about a file format that is not internal at all - the file
is there for everyone to read or write, and its format is shared
among hundreds of plugins and tens of hosts. And we expect a plugin
author to deliver a file, not an abstraction of it.
That, for me, means that the file format itself is public, and not an
implementation detail.
--
FA
stable library interface. I don't know anyone now
who *ever* writes X
protocol code, and I've never met anyone (except a few people I once
knew who worked on a commercial X server, and even that was more than
15 years ago).
This is irrelevant. Xrm has nothing to do with the X protocal, and you can Its also been a *very* useful approach as JACK has
evolved. We have
modified the protocol several times without requiring client
recompilation.
This is an API, not a file format.