[Portland] DAPI Sound for Portland? and general comments

[Mikael Hallendal]

10 jan 2007 kl. 19.36 skrev Marc-André Lureau:

Hi,

>> Recently, I have been working on a desktop sound interface. I hope  
>> that such, relatively simple, work can be shared. I don't worry  
>> about backends and implementation details when I just want to do  
>> simple things. There seems to be no such  clear API available. Or  
>> in the contrary, there is too much choice, and nobody really know  
>> what would be the best. Instead, let's talk of common features and  
>> things we would like to see coming soon, like theming and simple,  
>> nice properties (capabilities can be limited by implementation).  
>> That way, I would say DAPI  has the very same ambition.
>>
>> Discussions on xdg. Thiago proposed that such interface could be  
>> added to DAPI.
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2007-January/008995.html
>>
>> The interface proposal is here, providing C headers (with async  
>> handling) and D-Bus spec.
>> http://etudiant.epita.fr/~lureau_m/ds-0.1/
>>

I think it would make sense to have a call to play up a sound file,  
for example for when a new message arrives in your inbox. I think  
however that anything more advanced than a simple "PlaySoundFile"  
doesn't fit in the current design of DAPI.

More advanced functions such as setting volume, fade, loop, set  
position etc would probably fit better in it's own component for such  
applications (music players comes to mind) that need that.

> Regarding DAPI "core", what about a common vtable for main loops/ 
> events, similar to the one of D-Bus (instead of just leaving fd to  
> watch for)? It is interesting for different services implementation  
> without big limitations, I guess.

I take it this refers to the IPC layer that is not being used in the  
GNOME Dapi Daemon (where we use D-BUS). The idea is that all  
implementations will use the same IPC layer and as far as I know the  
current idea is to use D-BUS for this.

> And what else? What is the current state of DAPI? It seems that the  
> Gnome DBus daemon is ok, but I don't see a wrapper for a common C  
> API (that would hide the fact that there is a DBus IPC). For me, it  
> looks close to my initial design plan, but the CVS structure does  
> not cleanly express so.

I can only talk about the GNOME part of DAPI but we are currently  
waiting a bit to see where the D-BUS GLib bindings will go with  
regards to generating the client side library from the D-BUS  
specification XML.

We have discussed creating a higher level GLib-library as well but so  
far it's still open.

I'll leave the rest of the mail (discussion about source tree  
structure) to others and I think it will resolve automatically once  
the KDE daemon is being ported to D-BUS as well and whether there is  
any source code to be shared between that implementation and the  
GNOME implementation or not.

Best Regards,
   Mikael Hallendal

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