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

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 15.04.2017 20:39, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:

> 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?

Haven't sorted out which features really require a daemon like PA yet.
(any input appreciated).

Maybe we can devide it into basic functions and *optional* daemon
related ones. If there's no daemon, the basic ones still must work.

> What makes libpulse a better starting point for a cross-platform API than
> some of the existing cross-platform APIs?

>From what I see here, the PA API should be enough for the vast majority
of applications, and it's already well established, even crossplatform.
Those who already require others, eg. jack, will continue to do so
anyways (we cant make everybody happy w/ one-fits-all API). I'd just
like to have an common API, which is independent from the actual
implementation behind.

I know there're several other APIs, but they dont seem to be widely
adopted and lots of people have strong objections (haven't sorted out
the exact reasons yet), but none against PA. Some folks even invent
their own ones, that finally bridge to others like PA - just look at
mozilla folks (who now drop ALSA completely).

Of course, we can only count in the pure C APIs, C++ ones are limited
to C++ only and even make it really hard to provide binary
compatibility.


--mtx