I'm not convinced that the design process that has been outlined for GMPI is going to work. Watching the discussion about most items appears to me to have the following pattern: * a question is posed. * an initial set of answers, most of them based on experience with existing plugin APIs comes forth. * objections to one or more of the answers arrives, based on experience with existing plugin APIs and/or projections about future scenarios. * the topic is thrashed to death until only the people who really, really care about it are still paying any attention (and perhaps not even them). * slowly, everybody's interest in the overall process diminishes. And this is just for the *requirements* phase of the process. I've been an advocate of this model for some time, because I felt that collecting requirements without entering a genuine design phase was a good idea. Having seen it action for several months, I no longer believe that its going to work, and I'd like to propose an alternative. I think that we should people to issue summaries of existing plugin APIs. Each summary should answer each question that Ron originally set up as the agenda. It should also contain any meta comments about the plugin API ("works, but clumsy", "confusingly named functions", etc). It should finish by trying to summarize what there is that is worth keeping about the API, and what should be thrown away. Its fine for there to be multiple summaries of a given API ***BUT*** each one must be "complete" - no little niggling comments about a given API, no one-line critiques of this API or that API. At the end of this (meaning some period of time, hopefully collecting commentaries for VST(i), CoreAudio, DX(i), TDM, RTAS, MAS, LADSPA, and any others), we will have a clear overview of the state of the game right now. We should then try to come up with a synthesis of the results, but working from existing material rather than grasping at some intangible set of "desires". Right now, I feel that we are attempting to pluck cards out of thin air and put them on the table. I think it would be more productive, and a lot faster, to put a pile of cards on the table, and spend time shuffling them around, using the original agenda as a guideline for what we're trying to accomplish. I'm sure that people on the list will let me know what you think of this idea. --p ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Generalized Music Plugin Interface (GMPI) public discussion list Participation in this list is contingent upon your abiding by the following rules: Please stay on topic. You are responsible for your own words. Please respect your fellow subscribers. Please do not redistribute anyone else's words without their permission. Archive: //www.freelists.org/archives/gmpi Email gmpi-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx w/ subject "unsubscribe" to unsubscribe