Hi, I just had a [very fuzzy] idea that might be worth, or it might be not... I thought I'd just put it out here in the wild, maybe someone finds it insightful and makes something out of it. You're warned, it's quite a rambling... here it goes: what about creating some sort of self-contained linux-audio package manager, which is distro agnostic? I'm thinking of python (even perl if I'm right has a similar tool), where you have tools like pip to search, install and uninstall modules and you can easily create local installations on your system (virtualenvs) where you can tinker all you want without compromising system wide settings. Ideally with this system for audio you would have access to latest binaries of all audio apps and preconfigured environments... You could download the exact binary versions and configurations the professional and semi-professional on this list use and install them in a local directory, ready to use and make music, without spending time on configuration. Of course there are things that would not be easy (or possible at all) to fit in this scheme, like jackd, rt-kernel and audio card configuration... But on the other hand I'd love it if when I wanted to try out the latest apps I could just download a known working configuration and start making music right away, instead of spending days debugging compiling issues due to slightly mismatching library versions or whatever... The reason all this stems from is that I am only a computer-music hobbyist and dedicate a little portion of my time to it. It often happens I found out about a cool new app (din,giada, non-software, muse2...) and when I find some free time to try and make sounds with it, I never find binaries for it and I frequently can't compile it the first time, so I have to start the usual cycle: report bug to dev, wait for reply, supply more info, download patch, recompile and so on. I don't know if such a thing is technically possible... But don't the latest video games from the Humble Indie bundles use something similar? I.e. they usually supply a distro-agnostic installer which puts all the binary it needs in a self-contained directory, and then it runs more or less without interacting with the rest of the system... Ok I'm not sure it's exactly like this, but I think at least the critical libs which the game depends on are provided, to ensure compatibility throughout many different systems. Wouldn't such a thing, together with the possibility I was mentioning before of sharing such micro-distributions (maybe using something like PGP-signing to be sure you're downloading binaries only from trusted sources), be a great boon for linux audio users? cheers, renato
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