[pulseaudio-tickets] [PulseAudio] #422: Pulse and ALSA - ability to merge?

[PulseAudio]

#422: Pulse and ALSA - ability to merge?
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  Reporter:  mrguitarmann  |       Owner:  lennart                
      Type:  enhancement   |      Status:  new                    
  Priority:  lowest        |   Milestone:                         
 Component:  daemon        |    Severity:  trivial                
Resolution:                |    Keywords:  ALSA, Pulseaudio, Audio
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Comment (by coling):

 Personally I don't see the point in merging.

 The merge would only be a name anyway, e.g. it would be political or
 advertising motivated, nothing more.

 The ALSA project is really two-tier already. There is the kernel driver
 structure which is very well defined and is pretty good from what I can
 tell from general opinion. The second part is the alsa library/plugin
 system (basically user-space stuff). This is less well defined and the
 alsa API itself is pretty complex and can be abused very easily if you
 don't know what you're doing.

 So what you currently call "ALSA" is really two projects anyway, they just
 have the same label.

 So if pulse was to "merge" with ALSA, what would we call it. "ALSA Server"
 woot! Nothing changes.

 I don't mean to be flippant (well maybe a bit :p), but the only real
 problem with linux audio is the fact that due ot the open source nature of
 things many apps do not use the ALSA API correctly which causes problems
 with Jack and PulseAudio etc. when used via the plugin system.

 If apps were coded better (well not better but "safer") then there
 wouldn't be any problem.

 Ubuntu made a big mistake with it's LTS version. They integrated
 PulseAudio very badly. It's really up to the distro to make a good job of
 it. I know, I spent a very long time trying to get things right when we
 introduced it in Mandriva. My work paid off and I'm very happy with the
 end result, as were the majority of Mandriva users. Ubuntu have realised
 their mistake and did a much better job of the pulse integration last time
 round thanks to TheMuso.

 IMO, merging solves nothing. Better distro support and integration is key,
 and more pressure on application developers that use alsa lib to follow
 the [http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis.html safe alsa
 subset guidelines] that Lennart wrote is a much more productive idea IMO.

 Just my €0.02 ;)

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Ticket URL: <http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/422#comment:1>
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