Re: Proposal: replacing esound with polypaudio in 2.10

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

Does PolyAudio play well with alsa's software mixing plugin?
I have two machines here that use the AC97 and i8xx alsa drivers and none of 
these cards have mixing in hardware. Therefore, myself and a many-many 
others, have to use the "dmix" alsa plugin and then name it "default" so 
well-written alsa apps (not all) would play well when other apps require 
audio too. ESD works with this (more info here: 
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin ).
Does Polyaudio automatically detects that it needs to use a special alsa 
device instead of alsa directly, in order to provide software mixing and 
allow more than 1 app at the time to use the audio? If yes, would it play 
well if the user loads a KDE app or an SDL game at the same time gnome with 
polyaudio is loaded? What about a gstreamer app? If not, polyaudio would be 
a major step back for many users today... Mixing needs to work transparently 
across the board in the cases where no hardware mixing is available...
thx,
Eugenia