Syncing with 4Front (was: Re: Project Weevil)

[Alexander Leidinger]

4Front Technologies <dev at opensound.com> wrote:

> As 4Front Technologies gets ready to announce OSS v4.0 later this year
> (the 10th anniversary of OSS), we'd like to offer our assistance.

Since my personal opinion is to sync with the official OSS API, I'm very
pleased to hear that. What kind of assistance do you offer?

> ALSA is way too complex at the API layer but still very similar to OSS
> at the driver level (naturally since they started from OSS!). We have
> developed a ALSA<->OSS library called SALSA (for Simple ALSA) that gives
> you some level of translation between the few ALSA-only apps and OSS
> compatible drivers and it's under LGPL and we can talk about BSD
> licensing it if you find it useful. See:
> http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=296

Since those apps which use ALSA most likely will be part of the ports
collection but not of the base system, I think this isn't really needed to
be adopted by us. SALSA can just be part of the ports collection too.

I put it on my TODO list to have a look at it, but because of some
constraints it may take a while (maybe a month) until I can look at it.

> For more information on the upcoming OSS v4.0 API:
> http://manuals.opensound.com/developer/

Do you have a document which highlights the differences between the v4 and
the previous API?


Regarding the general problems of improving our sound subsystem: I think the
largest problem is, that we don't have an overview what we have and how it
fits together (at least I'm not aware of one). This reduces the amount of
people which want to try to work on it.

At http://www.leidinger.net/FreeBSD/src_docs/dev_sound.pdf (~11 MB) I've put
a doxygen generated document online which at least visualizes the call
graphs and so on, but this is of course in no way anything near what we
need.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net  Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org     netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137
Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret.