[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio with Motif?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 14.04.08 15:45, Rémi Cardona (remi at gentoo.org) wrote:

> >> You should, however, *NOT* only implement a pulse backend in your
> >> application. Put an abstraction layer in between to allow to add
> >> direct ALSA and ESD access, too.
> > 
> > If I wanted to do that, I would have kept SDL. Is there some flaw in 
> > pulseaudio that makes it less suitable than ALSA or ESD? And IIRC 
> > neither has an asynchronous API (admittedly I did not look very hard; I 
> > would like to avoid having to master more than 1 sound API).
> 
> Well, maybe if someone already wrote code for Motif apps to use ALSA, 
> that might be easier. The ALSA API is quite stable now, while Lennart 
> has said not so long ago (in the Skype-wanting-to-use-PA-natively 
> thread, IIRC) that the PA API could change.

The thing about the PA API is that it is very difficult to use, due to
its fully asynchronous design. It is a bit too low-level.

The native PA API will stay around and also be as stable as
possible. However for the future I hope that some kind of audio API
that sits on top of PA and other backends will take the place of the
API all people program against and that we then can drop all those
seperate abstraction layers all those applications currently ship
with. I.e. the native PA will have a position akin to libX11, and we
need something on top of that, akin to libgtk. (And yes, I am working
on that and it is called libsydney, but it's not ready yet)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4