Re: Pulseaudio

["Martin Meyer" <elreydetodo gmail com>]

I disagree with your assertion that userspace audio services are
wrong.  How about userspace USB drivers or scanner drivers? Is SANE
completely the wrong approach to scanning?

Gnome has ambitions of being cross-desktop. It can NEVER do that if
apps are connecting directly to Alsa, just like apps righting directly
to the Windows audio API will never[1] work on Linux. It might be
possible to port Alsa to other platforms, but that's still a wrong
solution.

The sound service allows for abstraction on top of the sound sink.
There's nothing wrong with writing to an abstraction layer. Whether
Pulse is the right one is not my point here, in case you're thinking
that. My point is, don't let apps talk to the low-level sound API.
That removes significant flexibility from our users.

Martin

[1] I'm ignoring Wine for the sake of this argument.

On 10/10/07, Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 10/10/07, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> > I tried and I'm still not convinced.  Unless there are some special
> > kernel patches in fedora making a big difference, I still hate sound
> > routed through a userspace daemon.  I would willingly tolerate it for
> > sound coming from network applications, but it's not a price I want to
> > pay for simple local applications when I don't care about PNP or network
> > sound.
>
> And bingo, thanks for voicing this so clearly.
>
> Daemons for sound routing are not just suboptimal, they are wrong. We have
> better ways (at least on Linux) nowadays. Any solution based on the idea of
> a userspace daemon is wrong. Not just suboptimal (which is unacceptable,
> because ALSA directly is - for Linux users - very much so optimal, and
> that's 90% of your userbase), not just "still somewhat acceptable" (because
> it isn't, we've ditched esound for that very reason) and definitely not
> "required because a small subgroup of your user population needs it"
> (crippling for the sake of network users - yeah right).
>
> Userspace daemons are out. Think of a better solution. Sorry PA devs, you've
> got some very nifty technology in there, the per-app volume control (which
> GNOME had a SoC project for, what happened to that?) is very cool and should
> definitely go in, sound caching is definitely needed, but this is just the
> wrong solution in the end. Those technologies should go in in some other
> way, the right[tm] way, and a sound daemon just isn't that. A sound daemon
> is the right solution _only_ for networked audio. Most GNOME users just
> don't use networked audio.
>
> Here's an alternative, crazy idea that some may consider, just for the sake
> of the argument. If Linux really is 90% of our userbase, which it most
> likely is, and people are doing all this effort to make sound daemons with
> configurable backends and all that, then why not just shift focus and add an
> OSS backend to ALSA such that it works on Solaris, BSDs etc, and then use
> ALSA directly? you will say no, but no consider the reverse argument of PA
> again. It's just as silly.
>
> Ronald
>
>
>
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