Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

Hi!

As some of you have probably noticed I released Polypaudio 0.7
yesterday. If fixes some of the issues that have been discussed on
this list regarding adaption in Gnome 2.10. (Especially those that
have been expressed by Alan Cox).

An excerpt of the list I already posted in a status mail
last week:

- X11 root window property based authentication
- IPv6 support
- fall back to getpwnam when $HOME is not set
- use setreuid() instead of setuid()
- don't use access() any more
- I investigated Alan Cox's point on TCP_NODELAY. However I cannot
  follow him on this. If I don't enable this option on the TCP sockets
  the transfer latency becomes horribly undeterministic. And for
  applications that repeatedly query latency information (like every
  movie player around) this is more than counterproductive. Therefore
  I reenabled TCP_NODELAY after a quick and unsuccessful test phase.
- chdir("/")

The new points are:
- non-fp mixing
- non-fp resampling (the quality of this resampler is really bad,
  similar to esound's. If I find the time, I'll add a fixed-point low
  pass filter to this, which should improve the quality by worlds but
  hopefully doesn't increase the CPU load much. )
- an esound backend
- check getadrrinfo() results
- limit number of concurrent connections
- kick clients that fail to authenticate within a period of time
- many, many more comments and documentation improvements
- ported to FreeBSD

The missing issues are:
- support for the X11 synchronization extension
  I am willing to support this. Unfortunately there's currently no
  example for things like this I am aware of, no X11 client which I
  could base and test my work on. This is probably kind of a
  chicken-and-egg problem. I will not pioneer in this area for both 
  the infrastructure and the client (read: a movie player), simply
  because I am not an X11 guru enough for that.
- Passing meta information for the hearing impaired. I am sorry, I
  don't see this as stumbling block for polypaudio's adoption in Gnome
  2.10. There's currently no competing free software that implements
  this, and I am total layman in the area of a11y. I will accept
  patches for that, and I'd even work on it if someone would pay me 
  for that, but currently nobody does...

The commenting of the code and the documentation is not yet
complete. There's still much work to do in this area, but I will work
on it.

What I'd like to know: what is still missing? what are the next steps?
Am I even near to get this into Gnome 2.10? Are there any general
objections towards replacing Esound with Polypaudio? I am interested
in a "yes" or "no" statement as definite and official as I can get it.

Thank you,
      Lennart


-- 
name { Lennart Poettering } loc { Hamburg - Germany }
mail { mzft (at) 0pointer (dot) de } gpg { 1A015CC4 }  
www { http://0pointer.de/lennart/ } icq# { 11060553 }