[pulseaudio-discuss] /.

[remrot at gmail.com]

2009/10/20 Daniel Chen <seven.steps at gmail.com>

> [0] Even recently, there was a poorly thought-out patch applied. It
> will be removed for Karmic final (too late for RC), and the right
> approach is being discussed with Lennart on irc.
>
>
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...

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...


Regards

JK
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