<Sound Dev> [9] Review Request: Find and load default.sf2 as the default soundbank on Linux

[Omair Majid]

Hi,

As Fedora developers, we have been carrying a custom change in our
OpenJDK distribution. It's a symlink from
$JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/audio/default.sf2 to
/usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2.

This makes Java have a soft dependency on the default.sf2 file. The
default.sf2 file is the default soundfont file selected by Fedora. If
the default.sf2 file is installed, the presence of this symlink makes
OpenJDK use that default soundfont file to create a higher quality
soundbank than the emergency soundbank it would create otherwise. If the
default.sf2 file is missing, OpenJDK falls back to the emergency
soundbank which is worse in quality.

This is the original request from a user that prompted
this change: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=541466

It turns out, however, that certain applications and build scripts break
when they see a dangling symlink in $JAVA_HOME. An alternative solution
that makes sense to me is to load the default.sf2 file from code. The
following webrev does that:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~omajid/webrevs/linux-default-sf2/00/

This is similar in concept to the approach that the Windows-specific
code in this file uses.

Does this sound like a sensible change to add in OpenJDK? It would let
more linux distributions take advantage of the default.sf2 file and
would allow us to stop carrying a broken symlink. It looks to be of
extremely low risk to me.

Thanks,
Omair

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