Re: [jazzplusplus-devel] Change of direction?

[Mark C. <ma...@re...>]

On Monday 16 May 2005 04:35, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> Thanks for all the energy getting Jazz++ started again.  Bummer
> that we couldn't get enough critical mass to shove the code back
> into production state.
> ...

That's a very pertinent point Kevin. It is such a shame
that some excellent code and functionality buried in a
morasse of so-so code should die, unless someone
miraculously steps up to save it.

A suggestion: rather than even try to build it all back
into a working whole thing, why not focus on pulling
it apart into the smallest and most usable components
that are actually usable, chuck the less than stellar
parts, and rebuild smaller, more *nixy components, that
are strung together via jack and alsa-lib ?

Then the possibility of grafting on Qt/GTK/pythonian
frontends becomes a few-weekends potential rather than
a few-years target. I think the ultimate linux based
audio "app" does not quite exist yet because the smaller
apps (hydrogen, specimen, seq24, various synths) are not
based on the same set of middle level libs and are written
by a variety of authors. We already have rosegarden/muse
so the mega-app already mostly exist too. Sure, jazzplus
could be become a better mega-app but only if 10k man
hours of software engineering are applied to it... and
by that time, rosegarden/muse will also be much better
and... well, then what's the point of not spending those
man hours helping to improve current mega-apps that do
have engineering effort and inertia behind them.

What, to me, is still missing is a coherent set of
small focussed audio apps that do one job and do it
well, and allow moderate level programmers to be able
to maintain and extend them, and are designed from
the very beginning to work well together.

--markc