http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495
--- Comment #232 from Alexey Loukianov mooroon2@mail.ru 2010-02-16 00:34:43 --- (In reply to comment #230)
Don't add something that should not have been existed in the first place. Don't forget that OpenAL can perfectly work with ALSA directly. BTW where is ALSA/OSS there in your "pictures"?
Nowhere as this "pictures" are for PulseAudio-enabled system, not for a normal and ordinary ALSA/OSS-native one. PulseAudio isn't tied to an ALSA/OSS, a sound producing backend may be a VPN-connected windows machine on the other side of the Earth.
Even better, there are native OpenAL drivers on some platform that talk directly to sound hardware.
Unfortunately not on linux :-(. It would be great to have native hardware-accelerated OpenAL drivers for Creative sound cards on linux, but it looks like there are very low chances for this to happen. So a.t.m. openal on linux is totally a software solution that uses other sound systems as output backend (sound servers like pulse, "native" sound card interfaces like OSS or ALSA, e.t.c.).
So, please stop lying to people that winepulse is not required.
It's not a lie, it's reality - Wine worked, continues to work, and will work perfectly without PA, using already existing OSS and ALSA sound backends.
winepulse existence would help a lot addressing problems that arises when using winealsa on Pulse-enabled systems. That is also a dull reality. Wine works perfectly with native ALSA+dmix or native OSS, but there are a lot of issues when using it in conjunction with Pulse. Sad but true.
And in the future using OpenAL as the multi-platform standardized backend.
OpenAL is an offtopic really for this bug, but having wineopenal and using sound transition path like Wine->OpenAL->Pulse->SB is a good solution, but using a path like Wine->Pulse->SB might be better (but I still prefer for myself paths like Wine->ALSA/OSS, or Wine->OpenAL-hardware-accelerated, in case it would be available for linux). The only advantage that OpenAL can give when using as a bridge between Wine and Pulse/ESD/any-other-sound-server is the 3d-sound support "out of the box". That is worth having really, though.