linuxaudio.org

On Mon, 2011-02-21 at 23:12 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote:

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> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 05:56:58PM -0500, David Robillard wrote:

>

> > > > It is also not portable (depends on X11),

> > >

> > > I don't care about any system that doesn't support X11. I don't even

> > > care about some that do.

> >

> > Which is why yours is a poor solution. It loses much, and gains little

> > if anything.  Making a UNIX only plugin or UI is fine. Making a UNIX

> > only plugin API is (in this case) stupid.

>

> Here we clearly don't agree. The method I proposed allows any combination

> of host and plugin toolkits, as long as the common factor is X11, and it

> doesn't require the host or plugin to know about each others toolkits or

> to link with them (which seems to be problem with existing plugins, see

> other posts in this thread).

>

> This excludes Windows (TM), but again, I couln't care less.

Yes, I do not agree that portability does not matter, and that X11

everywhere is an acceptable design choice. There is certainly no

shortage of people who don't agree with you on that one, including every

single developer who has implemented an LV2 host or UI, who have always

been free to do it that way ;) Market, spoken, etc.
So far, I see only cons to your solution. Are there pros?
> The only other alternative seems to be that each plugin is either

quoted text
> using the same toolkit as the host, or it becomes a separate app.

> The latter doesn't scale. A real-life DAW session could easily have

> a hundred plugins. I'm not waiting to see that work.

It is obviously not useful to have hundreds of plugin UI windows open at

once anyway.
The real problem here is one of design, namely that all of this crap

needs to not be a burden on host and plugin authors. There is another

alternative, namely the one I have been describing (see my latest

replies to Rui in this thread).
If you're on an X11 system, then you can use X11 as a base to support

several toolkits in exactly the way you described (if those toolkits use

X11, of course). The experiment you described is an implementation

strategy, and possibly one we should use in the aforementioned library

to avoid the out-of-process overhead. The source code would be useful.
However, there is no need or even benefit to forcing UI and/or host

authors to deal with X11 directly. That is simply a poor API design, and

a nuisance for everyone.
-dr
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