Still waiting for Flash [LWN.net]

Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 23, 2008 12:39 UTC (Sun) by wertigon (guest, #42963)
In reply to: Still waiting for Flash by nix
Parent article: Still waiting for Flash

I'm questioning why it has to be default. PulseAudio seems to have it's uses, yes, but the way
I see it;

"Oh crap! We have twenty different incompatible APIs in the Linux sound arena! It's a friggen
mess!"
"... Darnit! Wait, let's create a twentyfirst incompatible API which can wrap around all other
APIs! That'll solve everything!"
"... BRILLIANT!!!"

... Isn't that the kind of think that got us into this mess in the first place? Isn't it
better to deprecate *ALL* other APIs but three (OSS4, OpenAL and PulseAudio), and take it from
there? OSS4 because it's the best API available today for most apps, and is portable to most
other UNIXes (sans OSX). OpenAL because it works on Win+MacOSX+Linux, making it the best
cross-platform API today. And finally, PulseAudio for those who would need it. It'd solve
quite a few headaches on that arena. 'Nuff said.

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Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 23, 2008 13:21 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Actually the PulseAudio API is going to be superseded, by, wait for it, a 
twenty-second incompatible API, in the form of the libsydney library, 
which can talk to all the others! (Note the inspired naming after the city 
where the design was done: that'll make it easy for people to remember 
what it is!)

The nicest thing about PA for me is that (with the aid of, wait for it, 
*loadable modules*) it can emulate almost every other sound server and 
talk to almost every lowlevel API out there. I didn't need to recompile 
any of my programs when I started using PA: they still think they're 
talking to esd for the most part, or arts.