20 Jul
2009
20 Jul
'09
1:33 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Jack O'Quin<jack.oquin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Despite the fact that negative nice values are
ineffective for
achieving solid realtime audio, I doubt we'll see many distributions
jumping into the role of discouraging that style of programming.
Most distribution developers see their role as packaging Linux
applications in a form that makes them easily accessible to end users.
They generally avoid highly technical discussions about "how those
applications should be written".
If enough users want to run "nice-audio" applications, they are likely
to enable that behavior. Why shouldn't they?
given that many distributions have actively resisted enabling the
correct approach to writing such applications, i don't see why they
should not be encouraged to reverse themselves on both fronts: enable
the right way, and discourage the wrong way. it is crazy to claim that
they simply want to make things easily accessible to end users - the
debian packagers, for example, have argued that using SCHED_{FIFO,RR}
is wrong and that no app should be using memlock. so, they *do* take
positions ... i'm just saying they need a new one, and that is that
making lower nice values available for *this* purpose is wrong. there
may, of course, be other reasons to permit it.
--p