[Sugar-devel] csound or olpcsound (was Re: hello and how can I Join?)

[victor]

> Actually, your expertise would be needed to get the csound packages into 
> the distributions. Currently we have the standard Csound package [1] and 
> the olpcsound [2] package in Fedora. We should decide which package we 
> should move forward.
> 
> [1] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=76556
> [2] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=77007
> 

Good, I am glad to dive in straightaway. This is my opinion:

Csound-5.03 [1] is very old, there is actually a csound-5.07,
which is much newer. Olpcsound[2] is based on 5.08, the
last 'stable' version of  libcsound-5.1. 

The difference between the two packages is that olpcsound is
cut-down and adapted to the requirements of OLPC/XO. Now
these might not be the same requirements of sugar (as a platform
independent OS), but is smaller and lighter. It does not have any
of the CPU intensive DSP code fro spectral processing etc.

IMHO: olpcsound might be the best if we are not thinking of
any specialised/intensive DSP and we need a light package.
On the other hand, if these are not an issue anymore, we should
go with standard Csound, and I would recommend updating the 
package to Csound-5.10 and libcsound-5.2.

There is another issue, which is a real problem. Olpcsound and
csound conflict, as they provide the same SONAME. This was
not an issue originally, as olpcsound was built only for OLPC-N
targets. Now, if there are no OLPC targets anymore and we
are using FC targets, this is a problem. There is currently a 
ticket open on bugzilla https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=473185
which I am keen on resolving as soon as possible.

So if we don't need olpcsound anymore, we need to look into
updating to csound-5.10 and using that package. That will resolve
the problem. If we want to keep olpcsound, we will just need to
find a solution to the conflict.

Thanks

Victor