good, bad, downright ugly

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Mar 8 06:54:36 UTC 1999


Ian Piumarta <Ian.Piumarta at inria.fr> wrote:
 (You'll need Linux and/or the OSS lib [which
> is available for Sparcs, Alphas, and maybe some others] to test it. 
The
> relevant carrot is an avant-premiere of sqUnixSound.c. ;^)
> 

Two comments.

First, doesn't OSS require adding kernel modules for most systems?  This
would prevent many users from being allowed to install OSS--and thus,
OSS isn't as portable a target as the web page makes it seems.

In general, there doesn't seem to be any portable sound interface for
Unix systems.  Wouldn't it be worthwhile to get at least Linux support
working?  Right now Unix Squeak doesn't support sound at all, on any
platform, unless you install outside patches.  Wouldn't Linux support be
better than nothing?


Related to this is my second point: there is a LOT of duplication of
effort here.  Four separate people have now announced Linux sound
suppport.  Myself, I've posted three different versions of it:

	- a basic module which supports playing sounds on any OSS system  	
	- a module which uses pthreads, and supports playing and recording on
any OSS system
	- a more complex module which uses a Linux-specific interface, but
which supports startPlayingImmediatey

My 3 plus the other guys' versions make at least *6* versions of this
bit of code.  Each person claims they do something a little differently,
but how much difference does it make?  This is glue code, not something
that people will be working with directly.

Why don't we stick *some* version of *someone's* code in the standard
release, and then have all the rest bang on it?  Features would be added
for a while, and bugs would be squashed for a while, and eventually we'd
have a single, good, bug-free sound implementation, even if it does only
work on Linux.


Lex


PS: for the curious, the three files mentioned above are at,
respectively:

	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/squeak/sound/sqLinuxSound.c.1.23
	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/squeak/sound/sqUnixSound-trad.c
	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/squeak/sound/sqUnixSound.c

(No, the different file names aren't real meaningful, but they do serve
in distinguishing the URLs)





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list