[Bug 10495] Wine should support PulseAudio

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495





--- Comment #157 from Stefan Dösinger <stefandoesinger at gmx.at>  2009-10-08 07:59:20 ---
While this flamewar here was going on, Maarten Lankhorst sent a few patches to
improve our Alsa backend with PulseAudio. During this process, he also reported
a number of bugs to the PulseAudio developers, so PA can be improved. This
doesn't produce angry attack mails, but it does improve the situation.

I think this whole discussion has reached a dead end. I think this issue can't
be fixed in PulseAudio alone, and it can't be fixed in Wine alone. The sound
infrastructure in Linux still seems broken after years of replacing one
solution with a better solution.

First of all, it apparently isn't impossible to get this right. MacOS has low
latency(subjectively 0 ms) sound. I can play music in iTunes and play
counterstrike at the same time, and I am sure I could also use
TeamSpeak/Ventrillo if I wanted to. I haven't seen any problem on Windows
either, although I barely use it.

I have little personal interest in Linux sound at the moment - I'm working on
3D, and currently my main development platform is a Mac, where sound just
works. But still, here's my suggestion:

0) Stop this flamewar here. It doesn't fix the problem. (Yeah, I know my
posting violates this). Instead, help Maarten's work by coding or useful bug
reports.

1) Accept that PulseAudio is here to stay, and that we have to work with it.
Don't deny it, but don't deny that PulseAudio needs a lot of work as well(Ask
Maarten for details - I don't know them)

2) Help the PA developers to make PA work. If we fight PA, and persuade
distro's to drop it, its just a matter of time before someone else has starts
up a new sound daemon called SpeedAudio. PA is a typical case where someone
invented a new solution instead of fixing the existing one. They didn't yet
succeed at fixing the problem, but they succeeded at adding this to all
distros. If we attack PA, all we'll get is yet another broken replacement.

3) Possibly try to arrange a meeting between PulseAudio developers and Wine
devs. A personal meeting doesn't lead to a flamefest, and might produce a
useful set of isolated bugs to work on. (Unfortunately that is expensive, and I
don't know any established meeting that might provide a backdrop for this)

4) Make sure Alsa + Pulse works well enough for users.

5) I think Art has done a great work with trying to fix this by adding a PA
driver to Wine, but currently, as he correctly states, this cannot be accepted.
Instead of trying to get yet another copy of wineoss.drv + a few changes into
Wine, someone should fix the Wine sound infrastructure. I know this is unsexy
work, and hard to make Alexandre like it. Maybe I should persuade Jeremy White
to throw some $$$ at this process. We're having trouble with sound on CrossOver
as well, so I guess he might be open to that.

6) Once the Wine sound infrastructure is fixed, we can monitor the situation
and see where the Linux sound development leads to. If PulseAudio is
nevertheless replaced with SpeedAudio in 2 years, punch some distro maintainers
in the face. If PulseAudio remains the sound server of choice, but most other
apps keep talking to it via the Alsa interface, stick to winealsa.drv, same if
PA is dropped in favor of plain alsa+dmix. If PulseAudio is used pretty much
everywhere, and all other apps use it, add a winepulse.drv and drop
winealsa.drv. I think we should only add a pulse driver if it can either be
shown that there are issues that can't be fixed with alsa by design, or if we
can drop winealsa in exchange.

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