[pulseaudio-discuss] Moving sources and sinks

[Tomas Carnecky]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> I could repeat here what I wrote in response to Nick
> Thompson. Complaining about Free Software is nothing that makes you
> any friends in the community.

Fine. I'm complaining. But let me tell you this. I dug through the Wine 
alsa driver, the alsa pulse plugin and the PA sources. I now pretty much 
know how these three components interact and where the problems are. I 
simply arrived at a point where I wasn't willing to dig any deeper. I'm 
simply not ready to study the codebase any more. I've seen my share. 
Enough to be able to create a fairly precise bug report. So I wrote to 
this mailinglist and asked for help. I didn't demand that you fix the 
bugs. I just wanted some advice. And to that I didn't get any response.

> I am not using wine myself, and haven't looked into fixing this. I had
> a quick peek into it though. They did almost everything wrong that you
> can do wrong if you care about supporting more than a single backend
> driver for your ALSA code. They made invalid assumptions about mixer
> tracks, they use the super-ugly and not-portable
> snd_async_add_pcm_handler() where it is almost guranteed that people
> get it wrong (because those handlers are run from signal handler
> context, which has some very special semantics, ranging from errno
> handling to a lot of other things) and a lot more. It is nearly
> impossible to write a backend for ALSA that works with applications
> like these. Basically, the task is to clean up WINE's ALSA use, before
> looking on the PA backend for libasound.

The async handler was removed last summer, as part of the driver rewrite 
in a GSoC2007 project. And a lot other fixes also went into the Wine 
alsa driver since then. Most of the issues have already been fixed. The 
mixer code still may be a bit unclean, but that has nothing to do with 
the audio playback problems. If you know of any other outstanding issues 
in the Wine driver (apart from the _delay() misuse), please tell the 
Wine folks or me, I'll gladly forward the mail to the current maintainer.

As the chances of including a native PA driver in Wine are zero, the 
focus is on improving the current Wine alsa driver and the alsa pulse 
plugin. That is what I'm trying to do.

tom