Pulseaudio 2.0

[Brendan Jones]

Hi all,

pulseaudio is not the one man team it was of the past. Upstream seems to 
be cracking on at a grand pace. While they are debating the release date 
of pulseaudio 3.0, one of the Fedora maintainers has been kind enough to 
put together a pulseaudio 2.0 repo [1] for those of us who shudder to 
think of using rawhide on a daily basis...

Please let the list know your experiences. What we learn here is of 
supreme importance wrt. the audio spin.

For the really game, I have also released 
laditools,ladish,gladish,synthv1,samplev1 and Add64 whilst they wait in 
the review queue [2]. Be warned that a certain GCC 4.7 abnormality is 
creating havoc with jackdbus at the moment causing the ladi* tools to 
die on startup. An updated jack is imminent, but in the meantime you can 
roll your own with -O0 (rather than -O2 from %optflags)

Brendan

[1] 
http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/rdieter/pulseaudio-backport/fedora-pulse...
[2] 
http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/bsjones/audio-bsjones/fedora-audio-bsjon...

[Ian Malone]

On 21 June 2012 17:22, Brendan Jones  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> pulseaudio is not the one man team it was of the past. Upstream seems to be
> cracking on at a grand pace. While they are debating the release date of
> pulseaudio 3.0, one of the Fedora maintainers has been kind enough to put
> together a pulseaudio 2.0 repo [1] for those of us who shudder to think of
> using rawhide on a daily basis...
>
> Please let the list know your experiences. What we learn here is of supreme
> importance wrt. the audio spin.
>
> For the really game, I have also released
> laditools,ladish,gladish,synthv1,samplev1 and Add64 whilst they wait in the
> review queue [2]. Be warned that a certain GCC 4.7 abnormality is creating
> havoc with jackdbus at the moment causing the ladi* tools to die on startup.
> An updated jack is imminent, but in the meantime you can roll your own with
> -O0 (rather than -O2 from %optflags)

Well, I can play, what do we expect from it? Are there any user
visible changes or is it all under the hood? Any changes to Jack
integration (apart from unintentional havok)?

[Christopher Antila]

On 06/21/2012 01:22 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 21 June 2012 17:22, Brendan Jones  wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > pulseaudio is not the one man team it was of the past. Upstream seems to be
> > cracking on at a grand pace. While they are debating the release date of
> > pulseaudio 3.0, one of the Fedora maintainers has been kind enough to put
> > together a pulseaudio 2.0 repo [1] for those of us who shudder to think of
> > using rawhide on a daily basis...
> >
> > Please let the list know your experiences. What we learn here is of supreme
> > importance wrt. the audio spin.
> >
> > For the really game, I have also released
> > laditools,ladish,gladish,synthv1,samplev1 and Add64 whilst they wait in the
> > review queue [2]. Be warned that a certain GCC 4.7 abnormality is creating
> > havoc with jackdbus at the moment causing the ladi* tools to die on startup.
> > An updated jack is imminent, but in the meantime you can roll your own with
> > -O0 (rather than -O2 from %optflags)
>
> Well, I can play, what do we expect from it? Are there any user
> visible changes or is it all under the hood? Any changes to Jack
> integration (apart from unintentional havok)?

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/2.0

Looks like there are some useful changes. Also looks like Fedora has
been very slow at updating PulseAudio.

CRA

[Brendan Jones]

On 06/22/2012 06:42 AM, Christopher Antila wrote:
> On 06/21/2012 01:22 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> > On 21 June 2012 17:22, Brendan Jones  wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > pulseaudio is not the one man team it was of the past. Upstream seems to be
> > > cracking on at a grand pace. While they are debating the release date of
> > > pulseaudio 3.0, one of the Fedora maintainers has been kind enough to put
> > > together a pulseaudio 2.0 repo [1] for those of us who shudder to think of
> > > using rawhide on a daily basis...
> > >
> > > Please let the list know your experiences. What we learn here is of supreme
> > > importance wrt. the audio spin.
> > >
> > > For the really game, I have also released
> > > laditools,ladish,gladish,synthv1,samplev1 and Add64 whilst they wait in the
> > > review queue [2]. Be warned that a certain GCC 4.7 abnormality is creating
> > > havoc with jackdbus at the moment causing the ladi* tools to die on startup.
> > > An updated jack is imminent, but in the meantime you can roll your own with
> > > -O0 (rather than -O2 from %optflags)
> >
> > Well, I can play, what do we expect from it? Are there any user
> > visible changes or is it all under the hood? Any changes to Jack
> > integration (apart from unintentional havok)?
>
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/2.0
>
> Looks like there are some useful changes. Also looks like Fedora has
> been very slow at updating PulseAudio.

Somewhat - development seems to be really fast at the moment (they also 
have a GSOC student working on bluetooth stuff, which always helps to 
move things along). Usually pulseaudio won't get a major bump within 
releases but I'm sure the maintainers are willing listen if something in 
a later release solves an issue and patch the current version.

pulseaudio is a massively ambitious project from the start, but I do 
think its the way to go. Managing it from a pro-audio perspective is 
always going to create some work. The nature of Fedora was/is always 
going to create issues (pretty sure ubuntu released at the same time 
though). In any case its what all the desktop teams use as default, so 
we have to live with it (and hopefully make it better). I think it does 
a good job, but I also like/need to turn it off on occasion - this is 
more our domain.

I'm interested to hear if the backport gets better results for some of 
us (myself, I haven't updated my test box here but will over the 
weekend). I'd also like to take a more active role in squishing bugs, 
but its really hard (most pulse bugs relate to hardware/alsa and hard to 
replicate). I'd love some extra hands here [1]. If the spin does take 
off I guess we are also somewhat implicated in looking after this as 
well. I know there are a few of us here who know this stuff better than 
I do so I'm hoping they share!

[1] 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?product=Fedora&component=pulseau...

[Christopher Antila]

Hi:

On 22 June 2012 08:08:04 Brendan Jones wrote:
> On 06/22/2012 06:42 AM, Christopher Antila wrote:
> > On 06/21/2012 01:22 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> > > On 21 June 2012 17:22, Brendan Jones  wrote:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > pulseaudio is not the one man team it was of the past. Upstream seems
> > > > to be cracking on at a grand pace. While they are debating the release
> > > > date of pulseaudio 3.0, one of the Fedora maintainers has been kind
> > > > enough to put together a pulseaudio 2.0 repo [1] for those of us who
> > > > shudder to think of using rawhide on a daily basis...
> > > >
> > > > Please let the list know your experiences. What we learn here is of
> > > > supreme importance wrt. the audio spin.
> > >
> > > Well, I can play, what do we expect from it? Are there any user
> > > visible changes or is it all under the hood? Any changes to Jack
> > > integration (apart from unintentional havok)?
> >
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/2.0
> >
> > Looks like there are some useful changes. Also looks like Fedora has
> > been very slow at updating PulseAudio.
>
> Somewhat - development seems to be really fast at the moment (they also
> have a GSOC student working on bluetooth stuff, which always helps to
> move things along). Usually pulseaudio won't get a major bump within
> releases but I'm sure the maintainers are willing listen if something in
> a later release solves an issue and patch the current version.
>
> pulseaudio is a massively ambitious project from the start, but I do
> think its the way to go. Managing it from a pro-audio perspective is
> always going to create some work. The nature of Fedora was/is always
> going to create issues (pretty sure ubuntu released at the same time
> though). In any case its what all the desktop teams use as default, so
> we have to live with it (and hopefully make it better). I think it does
> a good job, but I also like/need to turn it off on occasion - this is
> more our domain.
>
> I'm interested to hear if the backport gets better results for some of
> us (myself, I haven't updated my test box here but will over the
> weekend). I'd also like to take a more active role in squishing bugs,
> but its really hard (most pulse bugs relate to hardware/alsa and hard to
> replicate). I'd love some extra hands here [1]. If the spin does take
> off I guess we are also somewhat implicated in looking after this as
> well. I know there are a few of us here who know this stuff better than
> I do so I'm hoping they share!
>
> [1]
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?product=Fedora&component=pulseau...
> &bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&bug_status=MODIFIED
> &bug_status=ON_DEV&bug_status=FAILS_QA&bug_status=POST&list_id=161356

That's kind of my point. If you look at those bugs, most of them are filed 
against very old versions of PulseAudio. Even the most recent aren't for very 
recent versions. Considering we're Fedora, I would have expected PulseAudio 
1.x to make it into Fedora 16 and PulseAudio 2.x to make it into Fedora 17.

Perhaps Lennart is wary of endless, substance-free complaints. That's not to 
say all PulseAudio bugs and complaints are useless, but people get so charged 
up about it, you'd think it's a text editor or something.

Speaking of which, Kate.

Christopher.