Choosing a Phonon backend

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 28 March 2008, Ian Monroe wrote:
> Plus it's not clear to me why the user should care what backend is
> being used.

usually they shouldn't and the system should provide sane defaults.

the overall system (e.g. phonon) should be able to guess this best, the user 
might be able to provide some good old fashioned 
human-knows-better-than-the-computer, but the application is probably the 
least equipped to make such decisions. it's also a recipe for subtle 
inconsistencies between apps (where do you set this in FooApp, BarApp, etc)

imho, phonon should orchestrate all of this and the app should stay out of the 
way.

if the use case is, "but my application requires the following N attributes 
from the backend" then maybe phonon needs a way to resolve such requests 
internally. that doesn't require the apps having any say over the actual 
backend selection, however.

> I mean if apps can choose "incompatible mechanisms", which 
> stops the user from doing so?

trial and error, most likely .. and at least this way the settings are in one 
place, not scattered randomly through apps and are gauranteed to be 
configurable versus the well meaning "nope, you're going to use backend $FOO 
with my app" developer.

every time an app requires a given backend, that's a failing in phonon imho. 
the xine backend is a good example of that, and afaik, is being addressed.


really, all the of the above are pretty basic framework design concepts.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-multimedia/attachments/20080328/1f5d7bb4/attachment.sig>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
kde-multimedia mailing list
kde-multimedia at kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-multimedia