Re: The ALSA Situation

[Manuel Jander <manuel.jander@usm.cl>]

Hi

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 10:23 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > 
> > Oh, that's hard to tell what should be the "default" parameters.
> > This strongly depends on the board.
> 
> Which is exactly why apps should not even try to set them.

At last somebody agree :) Frankly IMHO, setting buffer sizes in a sound
application, seemed always pretty silly thing to me. Its too much
hardware dependant, to be done inside a user application; sort of out of
scope.

> My point is that the driver can select some default parameters, and then 
> users just use them by default, and thus there are no issues of 
> synchronizing between them.

Yes, that would be very, very nice. At most, user program should have
the ability to ask for less_latency or longer_buffering, because that
relationship obviously is a tradeoff between 2 goodnesses. But most
current "options" don't actually provide any benefit. If choosen wrong,
sound output may even not work correctly.
The less options -> the more likelyhood that it will work (just works
paradigm).

> > ALSA tries to provide as much function as possible.  This results in
> > variety of configurations, i.e. the famous complexity.
> 
> That may or may not be a valid excuse.
> 
> Complexity also often arises from bad decisions. And the decision to only 
> have one user open at a time appears like a pretty fundamentally bad one.

I agree too. Its even worst with fear to a rewrite/redesign.

-- 
Manuel Jander
Electronic Engineer



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