Re: [Jack-Devel] RFC: jackd portnames

On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 10:05:54PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
 
> as usual recently, you sit on the sidelines bitching about what we
> have and haven't done, pontificating about what would have been
> possible and what would all have made everything so much easier. which
> of course is absolutely fucking awesome because you're just
> relentlessly brilliant, never wrong, always carrying insights that
> nobody else has, and always willing to tell other people how badly
> they've fucked up. it just cheers up my endlessly morose heart to hear
> once again how the development of JACK is so screwed up that you need
> to and are willing to fork it, and how every problem that the JACK API
> has can be solved with one wave from your magical wand that will
> impart clarity and incisive vision to all that it manages to reach.

Paul, I know you as a gentle and intelligent person with some
idiosyncrasies, and whatever you wrote is not going to change
that picture. Given that, I know that you know very well that
one can love, admire, advocate,... something and being critical
of it at the same time, that these things often go together, and
that when they don't ("you are with us or against us") there is
probably something wrong in one way or the other.

Anyway I never wrote that 'Jack was fucked up from the beginning',
or anything similar. And I didn't fork Jack. Two people did so
far, and if you want to blame anyone for doing that you know the
names. And I'm not going to fork Jack either. Maybe I will some
day come up with something that could compete with it, but if
that happens it will be quite different. Not different because
everything is wrong with Jack, but because there are alternative
ways of doing things, and these could have some advantages.

If that will happens depends on a tradeoff - the amount of effort
required to work around some of the problems I reported compared
to the energy required to start from scratch, taking into account
any advantages that would result from an alternative approach.

Returning to the issue at hand: allowing a user to decide on a
backend's port names seems like an excellent idea. As others
have mentioned it would surely enhance portability of sessions
(Ardour or other), much more than assuming that playback_1,2
is always L,R. 

If the user chosen port names just take the place of the default
ones (no new port attributes, only different names), it requires
little more than reading a list of names from a file. It doesn't
require arbitrary port metadata, not gets in the way of such a
metadata extension if someone wants to add that - not more than
the existing port names would.


-- 
FA

Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal, die Sonne scheint - ein Glitzerstrahl.

1320448264.13002_0.ltw:2,a <20111104231022.GA4370 at linuxaudio dot org>