[pulseaudio-discuss] Some things needed for wider acceptance of the NewPulseWorldOrder ; )

[CJ van den Berg]

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 11:56:37AM +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Being in the thick of things at a distro adoption level, these are the
> things I think that are important for pulse to be fully accepted.
> 
> 1. Improvements to the pulse alsa plugin to make it more tolerant of
> buggy alsa clients. Yes the correct fix is to fix broken clients but if
> there is anything that can be done here, IMO it should as while I agree
> with the principle of fixing the real problem and making better apps
> etc. there is just too much backlash against this at the moment and it's
> not helping pulse gain a good reputation in some cases.

What is even more important, IMHO, is to fix the alsa plugin (or alsa
itself for that matter) to work properly with *non-broken* apps. There
are still a large number of arguably correct alsa apps that do not work
properly with the pulseaudio plugin. For example alsa's very own
speaker-test. This is the infamous PA bug #23, which is probably
actually an alsa bug, which no-one seems to feel responsible for. This
single issue is probably PA's biggest short coming at the moment.

> 2. The alsa plugin should fall back gracefully to real hw if pulse is
> not running. This is a biggie IMO. Can it be done.

I don't personally think this is the best way to do it. Instead, I think
PA should enable/disable the alsa plugin on demand (probably by writing
~/.asoundrc when ever it is running). That way pasuspend could
seamlessly work in combination with the alsa plugin.

> 3. Make spawning/starting better/more reliable. Either get autospawning
> working nicely or make pulse auto-restart itself after a crash (not a
> successful shutdown tho'!). Clearly not crashing would be preferred but,
> hey, nothings perfect eh!

Not crashing is the only right way to go... ;). But besides that, I
think this issue should be handled by whatever session management the
system uses. i.e., gnome-session and the like.

> With these things addressed I think we'd have much less hostility
> towards pulse (of course not everyone is hostile but those that are are
> quite good at it!!).

Bug #23 is the only real major issue we have in Debian atm. That, and
any other alsa plugin related bugs, combined with some sort of automatic
alsa plugin enabler that works with pasuspend and we could probably
start pushing pa as the desktop default in Debian.

-- 
CJ van den Berg

mailto:cj at vdbonline.com
  xmpp:cj at vdbonline.com
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