On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 11:50:55AM +0100, Atte André Jensen wrote: > I often heard that it's considered bad when clients automatically auto > connect it's outputs to jack. I agree, mostly since: > > 1) This makes routing through other software before output difficult > 2) The patchbay in qjackctl makes it easy to make auto connects anyways > > But could anyone point me to some explanation from the devs (Paul Davis > for instance) of why this is considered bad? You just gave two good reasons yourself... I'm not a jack dev, but probably one of those who have been very critical of auto-connection in the past. In the most general sense, jack clients should not autoconnect (except when loading a saved session in which they were connected), because the whole point of using jack is that clients shouldn't care how they are connected. More specific, clients can't assume that any ports are the ones that make sense to connect to, this includes the first two physical outputs. Sending a signal were it isn't expected may have all sorts of unwanted, embarrasing and even potentially dangerous consequences. I've compared in the past a synth that connects to the first two outputs to a keyboard player who enters a studio and connects his instruments to the studio monitor amps. Another scenario is the same keyboard player installing his instrument on stage and connecting it to the first two XLR connectors he happens to see there. Which could well be the inputs of the amps driving the HF speakers. IMHO no program should ever by default autoconnect. In cases where it would be desirable for some or many users to have it autoconnect, this can always be specified in a global configuration file (i.e. something like /etc/appname.config) that can be installed without user action even by a binary package manager. At least in that way it can be disabled or overruled by a user who wants that. Any configuration data used to control things such as autoconnection (again, outside the context of an app restoring a previous session), should be specified in a way that does not depend on any specific desktop support (i.e. not by a Gnome or KDE configuration daemon, the users may be running another desktop), and that also is not specific for the tool used to build the app (i.e. not in ~/.qt/whatever, the user should not be required to know anything about application frameworks). -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
