As for a port being easier, honestly, I’m not sure I would have been able to get recording and playback working on RG on OSX in the same amount of time that I got to where I am now with EdenX.

It’s surely hard to dispute that a straight port would have been an easier and quicker (if relatively boring) way to get a full-featured version of Rosegarden running on OS/X — and from my dull, businesslike point of view that seems like a sane thing to want, even if I have no particular use for it myself.

(After all, the current SVN version already builds and runs on OS/X — http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/m/thorn-osx-blah.png — without anyone having ever lifted a finger to port it. It lacks sound drivers, but you could have hooked those up by now.)

I accept that there are perfectly valid (to you) reasons to rewrite rather than port, such as that you think it’s more fun and that the result will be a better program. I’m not all that excited by those reasons myself: I don’t do OS/X development for fun, and an OS/X-only version would not seem a better program to me.

Chris

Of course I am using facilities that we didn’t have, that Linux will never have, actually. I have a soundfont-capable audio and MIDI sequencer, with a default soundfont, already there in the system. I have a framework which lets me graphically design the data structures of my document and takes care of the saving and loading. That’s the equivalent of thousands of lines of RG code.

I don’t blame Linux for its shortcomings, I’m just stating them, and they are indeed inherent to its very nature. When I started this, you were puzzled that I didn’t go for a straight port since it was also doable, and that was the sane choice for you. Though I told you that Cocoa was much more powerful as a reason to justify my choice, it’s more convincing if I actually provide an example of what is possible.

For example, in the new qt4 codebase we have a much more tidy means for organising menu actions and the like than the old kdexml + masses-of-boilerplate-code method; we could have done that before (there’s nothing specific to qt4 about it and it’s not that much code), we just didn’t think of it.

I don’t deny that you may be using facilities now that didn’t exist for us then, and in many cases perhaps don’t exist for Linux developers at all now; I suppose all I’m saying is that by buying in to the idea of a non-vendor-supported platform (as Linux developers do) we can hardly blame the platform for the fact that they don’t exist, because we make the platform. Your switch of platforms was correct, not because there is anything intrinsically blameworthy about Linux as software but because you realised that you in fact didn’t buy in to the ideal of a community that builds it all itself.

Chris

That said, I strongly disagree with your point that Rosegarden was clumsily written. Yes we did our share of design mistakes, however we have no responsibility in the horrific mess that sound on Linux is, for example. Nor do we in the fact that advanced features like listeners or document persistence which are part of modern frameworks are unlikely to ever be available on Linux, for lack of standardization around a common development framework (among other things).

No amount of rewrite or redesign will ever make Rosegarden as simple as it would be on OS X, simply because its environment prevents that.

Interesting technically, and I’d very much like to read more of this kind of thing (how you get on with the various bits of surrounding infrastructure for edenx). I could really do without the polemic though: it’s great that you know how to do better now, but we both know that the primary reason Rosegarden is a clumsy mess is because it was clumsily written. By us.

Chris