[pulseaudio-discuss] /.

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 20.10.09 22:03, Markus Rechberger (mrechberger at gmail.com) wrote:

> 
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> > You'll no doubt be aware, but:
> > http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/19/0155235/PulseAudio-Creator-Responds-To-Critics
> >
> > It's full of the usual ill informed rants, but obviously user experience is
> > a tough one to judge as a huge chunk of the "user experience" with pulse is
> > really down to the distros, and we have no control over that for most
> > distros :(
> >
> 
> I'm also using pulseaudio for one of my product actually (just
> because the devices we ship have to work without altering the
> installed system).  My experience as a developer is that PA is a
> nightmare, we are just using the PA Simple API.
> 
> The App works flawlessly with Alsa, but with Ubuntu and the PA Alsa
> emulation layer the App crashed after reopening the devicenode the
> second time from the same process (this was with Ubuntu 9.04). 

Please provice a proper bug report and include a stack trace.

Are you sure this is really PA's or ALSA's fault and not of your
program?

Just because some problem is triggered when you use it together with
PA it does not mean that PA is really buggy in that area. It might
just have been a bug that existed always but due to changed
circumstance only surfaces in this context. That said,  PA isn't
pefect, so it might well have been an issue in PA. But without a
backtrace and a proper bug report we cannot track this down.

> So since Alsa started to crash with the PA emulation layer we added
> PA Simple support, this just crashed after the 5th time
> opening/closing the audio interface from the same process.  Since
> this affected our application we decided to split off audio
> completely into a second process and we check if the process crashes
> - if so we'll restart the audio handling of our application.

I am pretty sure you can do better than just saying it "crashed".  If
you have a bug to report, give me something to chew on. backtraces,
log dumps, whatever. But just saying "it crashed" is really not
helpful, not helpful at all. For non-developers bug reports like that
are not really surprising and OK, but if you are a developer, then
you should know how to track down bugs and know that I need more than
just a note that "it crashed".

> So when going through that I was certainly sure that noone ever
> tested PA properly and it was just picked up by the
> distributions. There should have been a big warning that PA is
> extremely unstable.  I do not know about the current PA version
> (note we do not want the user to touch their system just in order to
> get our app work with it so they should not have to update PA - keep
> it simple) I'm not sure how far the latest PA code is I'll probably
> see in a half year when distributions have picked it up again.

Right. Of course the distribution folks, the Nokias, Palms and Intels
of this world are clueless idiots, and you know things better than
they do. 

Come down!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4