Am Dienstag, 16. Juni 2009 13:41:26 schrieb Jerome Leclanche:
One of the problems is, every time one of these issues is brought up, we hear people complaining "But Pulseaudio should be a drop-in replacement! We shouldn't have to change our code". There is a major (and irritating) circle of blaming that comes up every time the subject of PA is brought up. If anything should be fixed first, it's the attitude people have with it.
<rant> s/PulseAudio/Wine. If Wine had the attitude towards broken Windows apps as the PA devs have towards broken broken Alsa apps we'd probably run 10 Applications with Wine and mostly rant about how broken Windows apps are.
It seems to me that PA people do not enjoy the beauty of writing a compatibility layer that is actually compatible. In Wine terms, if e.g. a D3D app works on 50% of 3D cards out there(ATI+NV) and fails on the cards provided by the biggest GPU vendor(Intel), the game is OK and should work on Wine. If you apply the same compatibility expectations to Wine and PA, if PA wanted to be actually compatible, anything that works on snd_intel8x0 and snd_hda_intel should work in PA. </rant>. Sorry. Just had to let of steam.
That said, yes, Wine does do some things wrong. And Wine is an open source app, so you can fix Wine, unless all those broken Windows apps. And we should fix our Alsa code.
Now, there is no current maintainer for the Alsa code, since Maarten Lankhorst stopped regular work on Wine. That's why we know what's wrong since a time and nobody fixed it.
So I invite everyone who wants PA working to volunteer to take over maintainance of the sound code. Winealsa, dsound and winmm need a maintainer. Before they have one, rants about PulseAudio go to /dev/null because nobody feels responsible to listen to them.