Hi folks, I'm just wondering whether something like PA's client API could ever become a real crossplatform standard API. The problem behind is there're tons of audio APIs - most of them doing more or less the same. So application developers have a hard time picking the right one, and dist maintainers have to put everything together in a way that their users are happy with that. Obviously, one complete audio system that rules 'em all won't work. Far too complex, and the requirements and wishes of all the developers and users out there are just too different. But, maybe we could settle to some common API (and later ABIs), which only sets the interface to the client application - isolating questions which daemon (if any at all), etc. For that to work, we'd need to give the API it's own life and have potentially many different implementations of that API. Something like POSIX for audio :o * have a official specification, which must be strict and precise (the current docs are good for application developers but far from a complete spec). * a separate API package that only contain the public interface (basicly, just some headers - a bit like the xorg-proto-* packages), which applications as well as implementations import * a compatiblity testsuite, which any implementation could be validated against * the first implementation, of course, would be PA itself, but others are free to provide their own ones (maybe somebody wants an thin one that directly bridges to platform API - eg. in embedded world) * from that point on, most applications (that don't have special requirement that need something like eg. jack, etc) could directly sit ontop of that API (instead of carrying around additional adaption layers and possibly platform specific code), while dist maintainers and sysops are free to choose whatever implementation they really want in their particular usecase. What do you think about that ? --mtx
