Re: Pulseaudio

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le vendredi 12 octobre 2007 à 21:20 +0200, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

Hi Lennart,

I'm sorry I couldn't grab a lock on you at last GUADEC to discuss about
using PA in our distribution (Mandriva)..

> Frederic still loves ESD. ESD is bad, in latency, in features, in
> code, in everything. I am not sure if you, Frederic, noticed that ESD
> only supports 2ch, 16bit, 44khz audio. Have you noticed all those 5.1
> sound systems popping all around you? Have you noticed that everyone
> hates esd? And that the most well known trick to get your audio
> working on your Linux desktop is called "killall esd"? Noone wants to
> maintain ESD -- do you? There are just so many reasons why ESD should
> be obsoleted... Dude, the next one who seriously suggests ESD as our
> path to the future in desktop I audio I will personally buy a ticket
> for a time machine, so he can fast-forward for 10 years or so and join
> the rest of us in 2007!

I guess you didn't noticed smiley on my initial remark ;)

<hat vendor="Mandriva">
I wasn't criticizing PA itself but the real need for a sound server,
inside GNOME itself, from a distribution point of view.

Currently, under GNOME, need for a sound server is only for stuff like
sound events and I guess most distro are configuring esd to release
sound device after a short period of inactivity so most other
applications can deal with sound devices without having much. For this
particular example, esd is enough and it doesn't scramble the rest of
the distro. Of course, we all having our various hacks to deal with
cross desktop stuff (like soundwrapper which is wrapping calls to
esddsp / artsdsp / aoss ..) but you get the idea.
</hat>

I'm not sure it is up to GNOME (as a project) to jump from one sound
server to another. I see this kind of choice as a "vendor/distro"
choice, more than GNOME project choice (if we can get rid of the hard
dependency on esound, of course).

> Regarding cross-desktop support: I personally don't care too much
> about KDE, but apparently you can set it up just fine like described
> here: http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup Xine (which I think is
> what amarock -- or whatever that awful media player everyone but me
> loves so much is called -- uses for the hard stuff) also ships a native
> PA driver.

I know it isn't the perfect place to discuss about this, but I still
think I should add my comments about this.

I'm a little sad you don't care that much about cross-desktop :( I do
care, because, even if I'm a GNOME person, I work on a distribution
which deeply care about cross desktop, and in this context, we would
prefer to have "one sound server to rule them all" than a myriad of
separate solutions, each incompatible with another (moreover, when we
see nice cross desktops solutions being used more or more, like dbus or
HAL). And we could not seriously ship something like "route all sounds
from KDE/arts to PA esd wrapper" as a real solution, right ? ;)

I hope you will release PA 0.9.7 soon so everybody can check the various
progress PA team did on it in order to integrate it on soon to be
released Fedora.

<hat vendor="Mandriva>
As a side note, there are discussions about using PA by default on next
MandrivaLinux release but I'm not sold to the idea yet, for the reasons
stated above. Maybe PA 0.9.7 will make me change my mind, who knows :)
</hat>

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva