Re: pulseaudio vs gnome

["Ronald S. Bultje" <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

On Sat, 2007-01-20, Damon chaplin wrote:
> Before it goes in I'd like to see a clear roadmap for audio in GNOME,
> with support for things from simple beeps up to pro-audio apps.
> 
> I guess this means gstreamer, PulseAudio and JACK. Is that the plan?

Wait wait wait wait wait. Are you suggesting that all this will be GNOME
technology? I thought the whole idea was to say that audio is a system
thing? Because it is! On Linux, there is alsa, and if you need
software-mixing, then there is dmix, and I'm sure stuff doesn't work for
non-Linux, thin clients and some hardcore dudes and those that
apparently can't even get their audio working (and then they blame
dmix), so there's jack or pulse (and/or both?) for them. So GNOME should
include all of that? Please no!

esd is in the platform because it already is. Realistically, it doesn't
belong here. Any replacement technology _to have complete feature
equiality with esd_ should be completely optional and a user should be
able to use GNOME without needing to use it and without needing to even
have it installed. Why? Because the whole soundserver for mixing concept
is pointless for many people with a decent soundcard, and for the
majority of the remainder, alsa/dmix should suffice.
Pulse / jack are undoubtedly really cool techniques on which a whole lot
of effort was spent, but they don't belong in GNOME, as part of GNOME or
anything like that. We're not networked thin clients, most of us run
GNOME on a desktop or laptop, and most of us run a recent Linux distro
with a 2.6 kernel. The audience requiring alternate technologies is too
small and too varied to justify putting all those technologies in GNOME.
They would, at best, be "recommended technologies" to get audio working
in some specific situations (e.g. thin clients, or audio applications
with certain low-latency requirements) in a howto or in the GNOME
documentation. Other than that, it really isn't our problem.

That probably means something like GStreamer to make it bearable for
applications that really don't care and just want to play song.mp3 or
beeps. And that should suffice.

Ronald