On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 03:19:19PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
Apart from JACK which is used in pro-audio situations, sound servers are probably going to be phased out on Linux within the next 12-24 months as people migrate to the 2.6 kernel with ALSA and the dmix/asym plugins.
I don't think sound servers are going away, rather they will use snd_pcm_open to go through dmix or hardware mixer instead of opening (and potentially blocking) /dev/dsp. The traditional sound servers are useful because of the minimal amount of code required to do something like "play this wave file". The major remaining drawback is latency; click on button in app, hear sound 2 seconds later when scheduler finally chooses the sound server and it gets swapped back in. It is also rather stupid that GNOME and KDE utilize incompatible sound servers. aRts feature set is a superset of esd's feature set, so it seems sensible for both environments to make use of that one, or to add a sound server specification to the freedesktop.org standards.
Maybe a better thing to do is rewrite arts/esd library interfaces to omit the daemons altogether. That way the daemons can go away, but the existing applications can be trivially migrated.