On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 09:04:34PM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote:

> >GNOME isn't interesting since we can fix that. Presumably there's some
> >significant unbundled software that is broken like this. For case 1),
> >isn't LD_PRELOAD of a fixup library better?
> 
> I'm not sure how LD_PRELOAD really solves the problem, except that it 
> requires users (and desktop environments, potentially!) to alter their 
> environment.  This is not a good solution, IMO.  The best solution is 
> one where everything Just Works.

Yes, but at what cost?

> And yes, if Gnome (and any other desktop sound systems) can be "fixed", 
> it certainly makes my life easier, and at that time I'd be happy to yank 
> the code.

Then that seems the way to go. Have you filed bugs against the relevant
code? Is it easy to find examples on google codesearch?

> One of my significant questions, though, is, are we certain that no 
> other useful cases for this information exist.  Certainly there places 
> throughout the kernel that uses this information, although they are all 
> for fairly "bundled" components (such as the filesystem code, dtrace and 
> kstat helpers, etc.)

You're using it for two things:

1) hacks for particular applications

We're not Microsoft and we're not obliged to bend over backwards for
applications stepping out of the APIs guaranted by the binary compat
guarantee. There comes a point where doing this is an awful idea for
long term maintainability. A perfect example would be changing the libc
allocator if the binary is SimCity (yes, they really did do this).

Brands are a much much better solution to this general problem.

2) providing ownership information

Arbitrary strings are a terrible way of indicating this. Some form of
contract would be the clean, correct way of doing something similar in
Solaris, along with contract decoration.

> The idea is a panel app that shows all the commands and gives individual 
> control over the levels associated with each running command.
> 
> Windows Vista has something like this.  Our own sdtaudiocontrol has the 
> same thing, but only shows the process id, which isn't terribly 
> informative to ordinary humans.
> 
> But in any case, the problem I have here is that I have to retain 
> fidelity to the OSS APIs.

It's a shame there isn't liboss or something then. To say the least, not
a great design, but I think you know that already :)

Again, which mixer is both important to Solaris and unbundled?

regards
john
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-code mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code

Reply via email to