Audio sample bank on the XO.

[C. Scott Ananian]

On 7/15/07, Noah Kantrowitz <kantrn at rpi.edu> wrote:
> This can and should be handled by the bundle unification system on
> activity installation. For now just continue with the data files in your
> bundle, the changeover to shared resources should be mostly automatic.

Agreed with Noah: activities will have a transparent resource-sharing
mechanism, so that if identical files are included with (say) Tam Tam
and Etoys, only one copy of this resource will actually be allocated
on disk.  However, this doesn't reduce the necessity of agreeing on a
common sound library, so that we don't waste space having multiple
very slightly different 'flute' sounds, for example.  We should agree
on basic sounds and sampling formats, since the resource-sharing
mechanism only works if the shared files are identical.

I would strongly discourage the sound library from going in
/usr/share/*, since the "base system" (which includes /usr/share) is
updated and managed entirely separately from activites bundles (which
live in /home/olpc/Activities). Trac #2064 is related here.  Mixing
the two storage areas will lead to trouble as:
  a) the resources-sharing mechanism only applies to files in resource bundles
  b) it will lead to dependencies between Activities and certain
versions of the base system, which are to be avoided.
 --scott

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