Moving Sound into Core

[Sean Egan]

On 6/15/07, Eric Polino <aluink at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure
> exactly how this would work as I am new to a lot of this, but it seems to
> make sense to me at a superficial level.  I'm starting up this thread to get
> a feel for what people think about moving sound into the core.

Sound is fundamentally a UI feature. There is nothing core about it.
Besides the obvious issue that Windows uses different sound than
Linux, which is different than OS X, there are plenty of ways that
sound ties into the UI that makes it inappropriate for the core: the
'sounds only when window does not have focus' option would not
translate well to Finch. Message queuing wants to control when it
makes sounds itself.

> As it stands the sound that Finch has is pretty much a carbon copy of
> gtksound with a few name changes here and there.

As you're developing an alternate client that does, by and large, the
same exact thing as Pidgin, it makes total sense that, here and there,
you'll want to take code from it: just as
Pidgin takes code from other projects that do roughly the same thing.

The slight ease in maintenance cost gained from moving sound into the
core in no way justifies us making fundamental, prominent,
user-visible, UI decisions in a back-end library.