Pulse Audio -- Wine should have instructions on this web site

[Chris Robinson]

On Wednesday 02 April 2008 03:26:40 pm Michael Stefaniuc wrote:
> Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> > What I really want is for all the people who are clamoring for yet
> > another driver to pitch in and start fixing the alsa driver instead.
>
> Right but you _cannot_ force people to do that. If they just go ahead
> and setup a separate Wine repo they can work on pulseaudio all the day
> and nobody can stop them. That's the OSS reality and git makes that very
> easy to do.

But that still doesn't make it The Right Thing to do. Who's to say PulseAudio 
will really stick around and continue to be useful? Phonon has a good chance 
of that, too (as it's backed by Trolltech/Qt, and is useable on several OSs). 
And I'm sure people said some of the same thing about aRts. But we know how 
that ended up.

And it's not even like PA's main feature (software mixing) isn't available 
through ALSA (dmix). Sure it has some other features, but they're hardly 
something that Wine needs to make such a shift for (most apps have their own 
volume control, and people that need device hot-plugging can still get it 
through the ALSA-PulseAudio plugin; or even the OSS-PulseAudio plugin).

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like we're getting jerked around with audio 
APIs in Linux (use OSS! no, use ESD! no, use ALSA! no, use PulseAudio!). IMO, 
we have to set down and just pick something.