[pulseaudio-discuss] [alsa-devel] Guide to Linux Sound APIs

[Takashi Iwai]

At Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:48:33 +0200,
Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> Heya!
> 
> At the audio microconf at the Linux plumbers conference one thing
> became very clear: it is very difficult for programmers to figure out
> which audio API to use for which purpose and which API not to use when
> doing audio programming on Linux. Someone needed to sit down and write
> up a small guide. And that's what I just finished doing.
> 
> I'd thus like to draw your attention to this new (long) blog story of
> mine containing this guide:
> 
> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis
> 
> I'd be very thankful for comments, especially from you Takashi and
> Jaroslav since it contains quite some details about the "safe" subset
> of the ALSA API!

Thanks for pushing this up.  I enjoyed this reading a lot, especially
about many DONTS that reminds me of your past screams.

The items listed there regarding ALSA API are correct as far as I
read.  I think this should be in the official document.  Well, maybe
better to reorganize the whole section of ALSA API reference first...

Anyway, I'd like to mark async stuff as obsolete in a future version.
This is a broken design, and should rest in piece.
Meanwhile, I'm not in favor of adding deprecated link warning.  A
compile warning is fine, but link warning is way too annoying.  And
there are programs right now using async, we are responsible to keep
them running as they are.


Takashi