On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 02:21:46PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: > >> stable library interface. I don't know anyone now who *ever* writes X > >> protocol code, and I've never met anyone (except a few people I once > >> knew who worked on a commercial X server, and even that was more than > >> 15 years ago). > > > >This is irrelevant. Xrm has nothing to do with the X protocal, and you can > > fons - i wasn't talking about xrm at all. i was referring to the way > that X encapulsates the X protocol in Xlib, and nobody ever deals with > the protocol itself. The protocol is the true definition of X, but > nobody uses it, and with good reason.
OK, good example. But I'm straining myself to find a second one. And X is something immensely more complicated than a plugin description. Also, there is not one X client lib but lots of them, and nobody could stop me if I were foolish enough to write my own... There's maybe a 'political' motivation behind my point of vieuw: forcing application writers to use a library to access an otherwise undocumented interface reminds me too much of some commercial practices that I dislike. I really feel this goes against the spirit of any open source project. > >> Its also been a *very* useful approach as JACK has evolved. We have > >> modified the protocol several times without requiring client > >> recompilation. > > > >This is an API, not a file format. > > There is a protocol involved in server/client communication. Its > isomorphous to a file format. OK, I see your point. But this is really a protocol that is internal to JACK and the way JACK is implemented. In the LADSPA context, we are talking about a file format that is not internal at all - the file is there for everyone to read or write, and its format is shared among hundreds of plugins and tens of hosts. And we expect a plugin author to deliver a file, not an abstraction of it. That, for me, means that the file format itself is public, and not an implementation detail. -- FA
