Re: midish: portmidi port feasible

On Sat, Oct 04, 2008 at 08:02:06PM +0200, Willem van Engen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm positively surprised to find a program like midish! One questions
> pops up though: is it portable to other OSes? I'd like to be able to use
> it on Windows and OS X too.

hi!

midish hasn't been ported to other API yet. But it makes few
assumptions about the operating system so it should be easily
portable.

i'm interested in porting it (and will help porting it) as long as
the port works and is maintained. I believe that the more platforms
it works on, the better the code will be tested. So i'm 100% for
it. I prefer OS native APIs though.

> Glad to find an mdep.c with os-specific functions, I still wonder if it
> would be possible to use a cross-platform midi library like portmidi or
> midiio (*) without having to mess up the source code too much.
> I hope you can give me some insight on this.
> 

there's no real "device abstraction" yet, so it's not enough to
just provide a set of device methods. However code should be
easilly reaorganized to use device abstraction.

Basically a port would be easy if the API can provide: open(),
close(), read(), write() equivalents and an interface to poll().

i know that people are interested by ALSA and jack ports, so if you
want to start porting it let me know, so we setup the device
abstraction in a way it's usable by those ports too.

-- Alexandre