Phonon Sample Cache

[Harald Sitter]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Trever Fischer
<tdfischer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Personally, I think theming game sounds is silly and would hardly ever be
> used; I'm looking for input from those who disagree with me because I
> don't think I'd be able to make a solution that satisfies that audience.

No reason to not allow them though :P
BUT Qt is not FDO aware(*), Phonon is not FDO aware, nothing we depend
on is FDO aware, so simply finding the right folder for sound lookups
would probably be rather a lot of code ... in Phonon.

I think that FDO compliant theme support should not be implemented in
Phonon but in a KDELibs wrapper ontop of a Phonon sample cache
implementation. So that the wrapper (which as part of KDE is FDO aware
and has all capabilities necessary to implement sound theme support
sensibly) actually resolves the full path of the sound to use and then
passes it to our FDO unaware Phonon class.
That is not to say that simple theme support could not be provided
from within Phonon for Qt only API consumers. However for that I
question the use as well.

Scenario:
- Qt only API consumer
- Only targeting windows and mac
- Does not care about some random FDO specs
- Wants to have a boring and a pirate theme for his application (theme
= graphics and sounds)
- Consumer implements simple theme engine which searches in ./themes
(relative from executable) for folders, each folder is assumed to be a
theme, within each folder is /graphics/ and /sounds/ -> consumer can
resolve full path to audio samples without any help from Phonon

To summarize. IMHO name resolving against a theme is a high-level
action that Phonon should allow but not implement.

(*) Knows about XDG_DATA_DIRS, can resolve reliably without
XDG_DATA_DIRS sets, can at least parse desktop entries

regards,
Harald