[pulseaudio-discuss] Moving sources and sinks

[Tomas Carnecky]

Colin Guthrie wrote:
> When I last looked at the wine alsa layer it was *really* nasty. It
> didn't even open the "default" device, it would instead try to open
> "default:0".... I think it was cleaned up a bit, but it should be very
> simple for someone to rewrite it or write a direct pulse driver. The
> main wine folks don't use PA so don't really care about this.

The reason why a native pulse audio won't be included in Wine anytime 
soon is this. The alsa audio driver in Wine used to be very bad. Lots of 
bugs in it etc. Last summer there was a GSoC project to fix the driver. 
That project was successful in that the driver now works. There 
basically aren't any problems with the Wine alsa driver anymore. Now 
that Wine has a working audio driver for Linux, they want to focus on 
that, rather then having a second driver that works only half-way.
There was someone who wrote a native pulse driver for Wine. 
Unfortunately I haven't see the code and I don't think the code was ever 
released. It probably sits in someones private repository. It would be 
possible to maintain the pulse driver in a separate repository. For 
example the ASIO driver for Wine is developed that way. And it works for 
the people who need that driver. However to merge the driver with 
'upstream', you'd have to prove that you are willing to maintain it, 
that it works perfectly and has no bugs in it. Otherwise they won't even 
consider including it.

tom