<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/10/20 Daniel Chen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:seven.steps@gmail.com">seven.steps@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
[0] Even recently, there was a poorly thought-out patch applied. It<br>
will be removed for Karmic final (too late for RC), and the right<br>
approach is being discussed with Lennart on irc.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br>This is good news! I've sometimes had the impression that there is not much communication (but more hostility) going on between the Ubuntu and the PA developers (just my impression, may be wrong though). However, I think that this is a more general problem, affecting a lot of distributions and application developers. But without regular feedback and communication, a proper integration of PA into Ubuntu (and other distros) is hard to achieve. And, since Ubuntu currently is the most used "joe-sixpack-distro", this a problem for PA because it results in a bad reputation. Add the bugs in ALSA and PA (we all know there were a lot, especially in the beginning) to this and you have a good explanation for the current situation... <br>
<br>However, I don't think that PA has been adopted too early by the big distros. PA is a pretty complex product, with many compatibility layers/wrappers that create their own special problems. It's simply impossible to test all of the combinations of PA, audio applications, libraries and use-cases before releasing it into the wild. But without such tests you can't fix the bugs and PA will never be stable. This is the classic vicious circle of software development, especially in FOSS projects that have few contributors and almost no funds. Even if you have a lot of testers (like the current Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. users), it takes a long time and hard work to fix all the problems. Most developers know that and have learned to live with it, but it is hard to explain this fact to the "normal user". Even if it seems that he understood, he probably will start a rant again as soon as he is personally affected. If all of the people that contribute to such useless rants would instead write thorough bug reports or at least provide some friendly, constructive critique, that would be far more helpful and avoid creating a hostile ambience that makes things even worse. A couple of months have passed since the KDE4 "mega-rant" and it seems that some people are in need of a new battlefield...<br>
<br><br>Regards<br><br>JK<br></div></div><br>