[MPlayer-dev-eng] [patch] prefer ALSA over OSS

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 08:42:18PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le quartidi 14 floréal, an CCXV, Michael Niedermayer a écrit :
> <snip>
> 
> See my other mail about your other points.
> 
> > ALSA is like forcing all image/video access in linux through libsdl and to be
> > honest the mere thought scares me
> 
> Somewhere, all image/video access in Linux goes through a common piece of
> code: that is called the system. The system need to be good: the API must be
> agreeable enough for developers, but there must be enough room for the user
> to configure and override things.
> 
> For example, as a X11 user, I would hate that an application I want to use
> would be SVGAlib only. That thought scares me much more than the thought
> that everything should go through SDL.

This is all aside from the point. Surely an application wanting to
reach the largest possible audience might support both X and one or
more direct graphics targets, like MPlayer does. The question at stake
here is whether these others are available at all.

Also, ALSA is not at all analogous to X. X is well-designed and has
thus withstood the test of time, and most importantly it's documented.
ALSA is horribly misdesigned and undocumented and thus has suffered
multiple generations of incompatible interfaces and countless bugs.

> I fear this thread is in way degenerating into the microkernel vs.
> monolithic kernel troll. It may be wiser to stop...

Note that if Linux had learned anything from Plan9, we wouldn't be
having this discussion. Applications which want simple
framebuffer-style graphics or simple audio access would just open the
proper device files and perform IO on them, and could then work
equally well on X or raw console, NAS/arts/esd or plain OSS, etc., all
using the clean, simple, natural unix/plan9-style IO model rather than
horrible bloated libraries.

Rich