MAS is finally added to freedesktop.org!!

[Shahms King]

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 07:56, Simon Perreault wrote:
> On December 24, 2003 07:27, Warren Togami wrote:
> > I assume this means that they are giving MAS a chance to get more
> > exposure in the Open Source community.  We all agree that a unified
> > sound daemon is crucial for our eventual world domination, but there are
> > competing implementations like gstreamer that already have heavy backing
> > and momentum from many of the same people who make our software (like
> > GNOME).  It worries me if the KDE folks would accept a gstreamer
> > standard... if only for the emotional reason of it beginning with 'g'.
> 
> We KDE folks have (and love) arts, so the process of integrating and 
> standardizing MAS begins in a bad shape...

Admittedly, I don't use KDE but my general impression of the "KDE folks"
feelings towards arts is not good.  Yes, it's better than esd.  That's
not saying much.  Currently, both KDE and GNOME have *unmaintained*
sound daemons, neither of which is very good.  And, while the search for
a replacement is not active, it is generally recognized by both camps
that a replacement is needed.  Hopefully MAS or Jack can fill this role.

As to unification not "going to win us anything"... obviously you've
never used the excellent K12LTSP (check out the RedHat channel today
;-P).  Sound is a PITA, thankfully Eric Harrison and Jim McQuillan have
done most of the hard work but some things still don't work right
(*especially with arts!*).  Of the three "supported" options (NAS, ESD,
arts) esd is definitely the most stable (not saying much) and the sheer
volume of dependencies makes arts almost unusable for this situation. 
Every meg you have to transfer to your thin clients (NFS root
directories, obviously) makes a difference and in order to run arts you
need a ridiculous number of libraries (not to mention a ridiculously
convoluted setup for something that is supposedly "network
transparent").  ESD requires less than half as many libraries as arts. 
And that makes a huge difference.

The above paragraph was written under the assumption that Eric or Jim
have gotten arts to work at all, which may or may not actually be the
case.

-- 
Shahms King <shahms at shahms.com>