Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Tue, 23.09.08 10:54, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski (dominik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
Do you mean Open Source Software or Open Sound System? In case of OSS,
it's realy a shame, because it was (and still is) a great piece of software
with nice API and doesn't require any external libraries like ALSA.
But you can't compare console/X to OSS/ALSA. The latter provide functionality
I must correct you: the OSS API sucks. And ALSA is certainly a far
greater piece of software than OSS ever was, and among the reasons is
precisely the fact that it is a proper library instead of some fucked up kernel
interface based on ioctls().
Everyone hates ioctl()s. The kernel people do. The userspace people
too. An API for application usage that is based around ioctl()s is
thus mandatorily a big failure.
The people whose opinion I value disagree. I have no strong opinion
of my own, because I never wrote code to interface with either ALSA
or OSS.
Oh my. So you know someone who thinks that ioctl()s are ingenious API
design? You probably should choose your friends more carefully, then. ;-)
They are nicely minimalistic in that they permit device-specific
operations to be passed to a driver without waiting for some
overly-bulky generalized intermediate API that thinks it knows what
every device/driver might ever need to do. The down side is that it is
very hard to subsequently decouple the application from the device - for
example to let it use a remote device on a machine with different
bit/byte ordering.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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