[pulseaudio-discuss] Stepping down; future thoughts

[David Henningsson]

I've decided to stop working for Canonical, and with that, I intend to 
ramp down my contributions to PulseAudio, on both upstream and Ubuntu 
levels.

I could have stayed as a volunteer, but in fact I've been a bit 
frustrated over some of PulseAudio's design choices for quite some time. 
Maybe some of those choices were right at the time when they were made, 
but they make us a not good enough fit for tomorrow.

 From one end comes the embedded ASoC drivers, who have never heard of 
timer-based scheduling, but can reconfigure themselves to decode mp3 in 
hardware.

 From the other end come sandboxed apps, and the security requirements 
that come with it.

And routing - we tried, but we never got that right. It's been 
difficult, not only due to all use cases and different demands and ideas 
from different groups of people, but also due to the way PulseAudio is 
built up internally.

In software nothing is impossible, but to re-architecture PulseAudio to 
support all of these requirements in a good way (rather than to "build 
another layer on top", which in the long run would make the PulseAudio 
even more difficult to maintain) would be very difficult, so my judgment 
is that it would be easier to write something new from scratch.

And I do think it would be possible to write something that took the 
best from PulseAudio, JACK, and AudioFlinger, and get something that 
would work well for both mobile and desktop; for pro-audio, gaming, 
low-power music playback, etc. I have been tempted to try; but knowing 
that it would be a huge undertaking, and I don't know any company who 
would like to provide funding for such a project, I'm not likely to get 
very far. Which is a shame, because I think we, as an open source 
community, could have great use for such a sound server.

All the best,
   David