23 Jan
2008
23 Jan
'08
1:44 p.m.
I'm getting the feeling that there have been some misunderstandings in this
discussion. Let's see if I can help with them, or if I'll just end up
confusing things more. :)
On Wednesday 23 January 2008 00:18:48 Bob Ham wrote:
On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 21:11 +0200, Nedko Arnaudov
wrote:
I don't think Nedko's proposal is motivated by a desire to work around
existing bugs. Sure, abstracting the LASH <-> JACK interface with D-Bus may
result in a less crash-prone lashd (i.e. if jackd goes down it won't take
lashd with it), but this is hardly the point. And I don't think that it would
cause the users to develop an indifferent attitude towards sound server
crashes. (For that we'd have to write an autorestart-on-crash feature that
would prevent any hiccups in the sound stream. :))
Bob Ham <rah(a)bash.sh> writes:
A good example. What does the watchdog do, exactly? It isn't a
frontend. I doesn't try to work around jackd's crashing. It just
ensures that if something bad does happen, the computer as a whole isn't
brought down. This is massively different from what you're proposing.
To try and work around a crash in jackd and present a system to the user
where crashes make no difference is to invite more problems. If you
can't get jackd to stay up, what makes you think you can get your new
system to stay up? More generally, LASH isn't a frontend for
JACK.
What about the jack watchdog? What does get killed by it? A layer that abstracts away the incidental
obligations of being a JACK client would be good but that is very far
from the domain that LASH is intended to help with.
If such a layer could be beneficial (which is my belief also), why do you
think that it's outside the scope of LASH planned improvements?
To view LASH as the centre of a linux audio system is
to misunderstand
its purpose. It might be able to *facilitate* a unified system, along
with JACK and other APIs, but it isn't the unified system itself. Such
a role is intended for the much-loathed "server interface" distinguished
in the LASH API.
I personally don't see LASH as the centre of the audio system, and I'm not
sure that Nedko meant to say that either.
Patchage was always the intended style of interface
for managing LASH
sessions and the audio system as a whole. LASH implements the
infrastructure necessary for such a system, but it doesn't implement the
system itself. It doesn't provide a patch-connection abstraction; it
doesn't try to start and stop jackd.
I think we all agree on that. LASH isn't the controller application, it's
something that a controller application needs to fulfill its purpose.
It seems that what you want is Patchage++.
Unfortunately, LASH isn't
that and I think you're likely to run into problems if you try and turn
it into that.
Yes, at least I would like to see the day when one application can manage
everything that the concept of an "audio session" includes (Patchage is
probably pretty good already). But you've misunderstood the purpose of this
discussion. We're not out to turn LASH into a super daemon/application of the
sort that you're worried about. What we are trying to do is to think of how
the interfaces and features of LASH could better help support a controller
application's operation.
Juuso