[Mageia-dev] mageia sound tasks

[Frank Kober]

--- En date de : Sam 18.12.10, Michael scherer <misc at zarb.org> a écrit :

> So maybe a wizard is a better solution than using a rpm
> that does magically everything.


Just to get things clear a bit, I'd like to summarize the status of that on which we remained in very good agreement at mandriva:

1) The linux audio (-creating) community is not huge, yet very active and willing to participate, they exploit a bunch of unique applications and server structure who make that linux is nonetheless a well known and growing audio production system.
2) Jack users rely on a couple of very small adaptations in order to have a low-latency system suitable for a good jack performance. 
3) There are many solutions of dedicated distributions for audio/video creation, and all have their goods and bads.
4) Mageia will remain a general purpose distro departing from a general purpose distro that had everything to turn it quickly into a VERY well performing audio creation system, not more and not less at the moment.

So this has IMO the following consequences:

* We should not make spin-offs since we would lose the benefit of a high-level maintenance and up-to-date-ness of general packages and the distro itself. There are many examples of dedicated AV-distros that do audio OK but all the rest is in a varying shape.

* I fully agree with Misc on the need of a finer adjustment than tasks for handling audio/video/creation software. A wizzard or dedicated installer program is surely the best solution since that could also do the 2 or three config changes:
1) PAM limits.conf 
2) cpufreq
3) handle pulseaudio interferences (i.e. keep the very much appreciated possibility to switch it off)
4) handle alsa device lists and default device in a human-friendly fashion

* The task-sound-studio is a good basis and it can currently be installed with --no-suggests to get all the hard-to-find stuff installed without flooding the system with unnecessary apps.

* We (packagers) can do best if we provide up-to-date software and also collect points and ideas on how to handle the peculiarities so that they can be best integrated into the future "Magxtools". Here is a huge and unique chance to produce a distro that works for musicians without compromises on the general quality.

* It is too early now to make decisions, and we do not want to "flood" the mageia-dev list with this, but we need to see how much importance the whole thing has and to measure the scope of it within the distro before creating dedicated team channels/lists.

For the time being I think we are allowed to discuss on #linuxmao or #mageia-dev.
 
Regards
Frank