Proposal: replacing esound with polypaudio in 2.10

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

Hi!

I would like to propose Polypaudio as a replacement for ESOUND in
Gnome 2.10. Polypaudio is a sound server I have been developing for
the last months. It aims to be a drop-in replacement for esound fixing
all those problems esound has. For more information on polypaudio,
see:

http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/polypaudio/

The two most important requirements for an ESOUND replacement are met
with polypaudio: (at least I think that these are the most important
issues)

- Polypaudio provides an ESOUND compatibility module. When this is
  enabled polypaudio emulates an esound server, including autospawning
  and thinks like that. The protocol emulation polypaudio implements
  is not complete: some of the more esoteric commands are implemented
  as NOOPs. However, all commands currently used by Gnome 2.8
  are available. Keep in mind that polypaudio emulates the protocol, not
  the library API: i.e. there's no need to patch, recompile or relink
  any ESOUND based applications for usage with polypaudio. 

- There's now a polypaudio sink for gstreamer. It's curentely not as
  featureful as the oss sink, but it is good enough for rhythmbox.

What other requirements have to be met for inclusion of polypaudio in
Gnome? I am strongly interested in getting polypaudio in shape for
Gnome 2.10 in time: so please, don't hesitate to criticize polypaudio
and especially its client API:

http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/polypaudio/doxygen/

Portability: I develop Polypaudio mostly on Linux. There's some
compatibility with OSX, but it is not merged yet. No, it hasn't been
ported to Solaris or xBSD yet. However the package makes use of
autoconf, so I expect the port is easy to do. Polypaudio has been
packaged for Ubuntu by Jeff Waugh, a package for Debian is on its way,
as it seems.

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