[Bug 10495] Wine should support PulseAudio

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

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





--- Comment #174 from Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>  2009-10-09 16:44:58 ---
(In reply to comment #166)
> Why do you assume a need for dropping winealsa.drv?

Not assuming.

> PulseAudio isn't going to go away

ALSA isn't going away, not even on "small" distros like Debian and Gentoo.
Remember those anyone? You know, distros that allow you to install what YOU
want?

> Running Windows Games with sound hassle-free via Wine on a modern
> desktop distro like openSUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu. And, to be honest - those
> are the main targets for people switching from Windows. And Wine
> targets exactly those people:
> http://wiki.winehq.org/ImportanceOfWine#head-5de2e9203c0811bff87c77b0fa026f0b0753a117

No. Wine does not target specific distros.

> But a good solution today is better than a perfect solution tomorrow -
> even if it's just a stop-gap solution.

The problem is that winepulse is not even a "good" solution - if the whole
internal sound API gets rewritten to be more modular, then it's even more work
to port a new driver over to it. Regardless, AJ tends to only like
(near-)perfect solutions.

(In reply to comment #168)
> (In reply to comment #167)
> > How hard can it be?
>
> The thing is, while ALSA alone may catch a) and c), b) and d) always were an
> issue for a normal user.

No. None of these are an issue for a "normal" user since dmix was enabled by
default back in 1.0.something. (Power/professional users may have to fiddle
with b) a bit more, but that's true for any system.) It's only cases where
things like pulse steal the hardware (especially on Ubuntu, it seems) that b)
and d) become problems.

That said, ALSA's OSS emulation steals the hardware from the rest of ALSA.

> PulseAudio, on the other hand, certainly excels in b) (just look at the new
> gnome-volume-control) and obviously d).

But it most certainly fails fails a).

> As for a), PulseAudio is the choice for the desktop distributions - and, while
> technically irrelevant to Wine because of ARM chipsets, even Nokia's Maemo and
> Palm's WebOS use PulseAudio on mobiles.

Maemo historically used ESD. Pulse is the natural step from ESD as it means
your software doesn't have to be rewritten. This really isn't relevant though;
you could equally argue that Intel processors are obsolete because all the
current games consoles use PPCs.

Maybe we should have a separate bug for redesigning Wine's audio API, and set
it up as a blocker to this one?

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