Re: [OT] ALSA userspace API complexity

Jaroslav Kysela
2006-01-04T11:35:25Z

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, Pete Zaitcev wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Jan 2006 09:37:55 +0000, Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > > 2) ALSA API is to complicated: most applications opens single sound
> > > stream.
> >
> > FUD and nonsense. []
> > http://devzero.co.uk/~alistair/alsa/
>
> That's the kicker, isn't it? Once you get used to it, it's a workable
> API, if kinky and verbose. I have a real life example, too:
> http://people.redhat.com/zaitcev/linux/mpg123-0.59r-p3.diff
> But arriving on the solution costed a lot of torn hair. Look at this
> bald head here! And who is going to pay my medical bills when ALSA
> causes me ulcers, Jaroslav?

Well, the ALSA primary goal is to be the complete HAL not hidding the
extra hardware capabilities to applications. So API might look a bit
complicated for the first glance, but the ALSA interface code for simple
applications is not so big, isn't?

Also, note that app developers are not forced to use ALSA directly - there
is a lot of "portable" sound API libraries having an ALSA backend doing
this job quite effectively. We can add a simple (like OSS) API layer
into alsa-lib, but I'm not sure, if it's worth to do it. Perhaps, adding
some support functions for the easy PCM device initialization might be
a good idea.

Jaroslav

-----
Jaroslav Kysela <perex@suse.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, SUSE Labs