[pulseaudio-discuss] Can pulsaudio client API become a crossplatform standard ?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2017-04-15 at 15:28 +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> 
> I'm just wondering whether something like PA's client API could
> ever become a real crossplatform standard API.
> 
> The problem behind is there're tons of audio APIs - most of them
> doing more or less the same. So application developers have a hard
> time picking the right one, and dist maintainers have to put everything
> together in a way that their users are happy with that.
> 
> Obviously, one complete audio system that rules 'em all won't work.
> Far too complex, and the requirements and wishes of all the developers
> and users out there are just too different.
> 
> But, maybe we could settle to some common API (and later ABIs),
> which only sets the interface to the client application - isolating
> questions which daemon (if any at all), etc.
> 
> For that to work, we'd need to give the API it's own life and have
> potentially many different implementations of that API. Something
> like POSIX for audio :o
> 
> * have a official specification, which must be strict and precise
>   (the current docs are good for application developers but far
>   from a complete spec).
> * a separate API package that only contain the public interface
>   (basicly, just some headers - a bit like the xorg-proto-* packages),
>   which applications as well as implementations import
> * a compatiblity testsuite, which any implementation could be validated
>   against
> * the first implementation, of course, would be PA itself, but others
>   are free to provide their own ones (maybe somebody wants an thin
>   one that directly bridges to platform API - eg. in embedded world)
> * from that point on, most applications (that don't have special
>   requirement that need something like eg. jack, etc) could directly
>   sit ontop of that API (instead of carrying around additional
>   adaption layers and possibly platform specific code), while dist
>   maintainers and sysops are free to choose whatever implementation
>   they really want in their particular usecase.
> 
> 
> What do you think about that ?

The feature set of libpulse will necessarily track the features of the
pulseaudio daemon. Is the idea to take a subset of the libpulse API and
make that work on non-pulseaudio platforms? What makes libpulse a
better starting point for a cross-platform API than some of the
existing cross-platform APIs?

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk