Proposal for KDE media interface

[Morten Hustveit]

> On Tuesday August 05, 2003 02:06, Morten Hustveit wrote:
> > The interface is documented at
> > <http://www.ping.uio.no/~mortehu/kmedia/annotated.html>.  I'll delay
> > implementation until you people tell me what's wrong with the interface.

On Tuesday 05 August 2003 23:10, Neil Stevens wrote:
> I suggest you wait until the KDE 4 run up begins, when we decide what media
> system to use.

One purpose of this API is to make this the user's decision.  Also, I don't 
see why we should wait until the next major release, as adding a new 
interface does not break binary compatibility.

> Arts and our supporting libraries (libartskde, KMediaPlayer) are not going
> anywhere, so there's no sense in duplicating them right now.

I'm not suggesting to make aRts vanish; I'm suggesting to deprecate its use.  
New KDE applications will use the new interface, old applications will be 
ported whenever the maintainers feel like it, and by KDE 4.0 the aRts 
dependency will be removed.  KMediaPlayer would obviously simply be ported to 
use the new interface rather than aRts directly.  The sense lies in 
preventing new applications from using a soon-to-be-deprecated interface 
(aRts).  Not having a documented interface probably also hurts development.  
Also, people can start using alternative backends /now/ (in the applications 
supporting this), rather than waiting for KDE 4, at the small cost of a 
slightly increased library size.

Please don't arbitrarily send carbon copies.