9 May
2007
9 May
'07
2:52 p.m.
On 9 May 2007, at 17:44, Thomas Vecchione wrote:
I expect the majority of plugins will only use the core spec. The
hosts can tell which plugins they don't have support for, and why so
they could do something intelligent in the UI (greying out and
tooltips or whatever).
There's also a lot of support to allow plugins to gracefully degrade,
or provide alternative implementations when a feature that they'd
like is not present.
This is
intentional. LV2 is not intended to include every single
feature that everyone might want. It is intended for it to
be /possible/ to implement any feature someone might want (this is
why
LV2 actually exists in a useful state and, say, GMPI does not...)
While this makes perfect since in flexibility from a programmer
perspective, I wonder how it will affect things from an end-user
perspective, especially if LV2 becomes popular(Which many hope it
would)...
The end user will have some plugins that are 'LV2' that will work
in some 'LV2' hosts but not others. How are they to know? Will
they have to have 'LV2 and supports these features' that they will
have to check off every time to see if it should be working or not? Or 'Profiles' that fit a certain set of
features?
Sure, why not? It's just a social contract.
Don't get me wrong, I love how flexible LV2 is
intended to be.
However without some baseline for it, there are some definite
concerns when writing plugins in as far as compatibility for an end-
user that may not know to check every last little additional function.
They wont have to. The point that they might not understand why for
eg. Ardour can't load one of Nedko's plugins is reasonable though.
Perhaps LV2 should by default include extensions that
encompass the
points brought up here instead of dismissing them as capable of
being done, as if they can be done in one host, not nesseccarily in
all, then you have one giant mass of confusion in as far as what
plugins can be sued here, there or whatever, and instead of a
standard plugin format, we have a giant clusterf**k.
That's a possibility for the future, I would expect any LV2 1.1 to be
the core spec + a set of commonly used extensions.
Discussing spec issues in an open forum like this though is a futile
effort, and it's simply not true that you can't get a lot done with
the core spec. LV2 is more capable than LADSPA, and there are some
hundred LADSPA plugins, which work to some degree :)
- Steve