Re: (Partial) GNOME 3 status update

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Patryk:

> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Brian Cameron<Brian Cameron sun com> wrote:
> > Solaris continues to use gst-mixer since Solaris does not yet provide
> > PulseAudio.  PulseAudio doesn't provide as much value on Solaris since
> > OSSv4 provides mixing functionalities directly in the OSS layer.
>
> Would introducing PA have any downsides? Having a common abstraction
> layer for sound would likely make it easier to develop portable apps.

There would be some advantages for using PulseAudio, yes.  Positional
sounds could be an interesting feature, for example.  This was discussed
before.  Refer:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00208.html

However, many of the additional benefits (e.g. GlitchFree) requires
support in the drivers, which currently does not exist on Solaris.  It
would be a significant effort to add such features, and not currently
in the plans.  However, this could perhaps change sometime in the future
and make PulseAudio more attractive on Solaris.

Also, for PulseAudio to work properly, you need to redirect all audio
applications to use it.  On Solaris, this would be a non-trivial effort
since we need to support several applications that aren't designed to
use PulseAudio currently (such as Real Player, Flash, etc.).

In short, it would be a fair bit of work to integrate PulseAudio, and
the benefits do not seem worth the effort at the moment.

Brian