[pulseaudio-discuss] Stepping down; future thoughts

[Ahmed S. Darwish]

Hi David :-)

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 06:36:30AM +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> 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.
>

As a user, I send my gratitude for all of your work for a better
Linux audio. And as a recent contributor, _big_ _thanks_ for your
very solid reviews and IRC discussions .. I've definitely learned
a lot (summary: "keep it simple")

> 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.
>

Memfds + per-client global mempool + policy + protections against
malicious clients + a fuzzer, and we should then be OK - right? :)

> 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.
>

Would the Linux userspace be ready for yet another audio API?

> 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.

Hmm, .. RedHat has been very interested in containers and
sandboxing support lately. This is true to the level of making
almost the entire latest DevConf.cz about that topic [*] Given
the proposal's relation to security and sandboxing, maybe they
can have some interest in such a new project..

[*] https://lwn.net/Articles/675201/

So long, and thanks for all the fish ;-)

Best of luck,
-- 
Darwish
http://darwish.chasingpointers.com