Is PulseAudio dead?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 02.08.10 23:09, pbrobinson at gmail.com (pbrobinson at gmail.com) wrote:

> 
> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Robert 'Bob' Jensen wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> ----- "Carl G." <carl.gaudreault at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > Well, i'm happy to be a bug triager so
> >> > you can get "real work" done. /s
> >> >
> >> > Let me know if you need some help to
> >> > make the stats looks pretty.
> >>
> >> Thank You Carl, this will help the community a lot and is a perfect example of why public emails work.
> >>
> >
> > I think what Bob is meaning to point out is that it does seem like risky
> > behavior for the upstream of a core system in Fedora to stop developing it
> > and start developing a new core system.  It's not 100% clear that's what
> > is going on, but the thread that's been started does provide evidence that
> > might be happening.
> >
> > Do we know if PulseAudio upstream is still self sustaining and healthy and
> > that this lapse response is just a temporary thing?  It's a legitimate
> > concern considering how critical PA is.
> 
> While Lennart has moved onto bigger and better things, which isn't a
> bad thing, it seems that the maintainership of PA in Fedora hasn't
> moved on to other maintianers or at least if Lennart is interested in
> maintaining it he hasn't aquired someone to assist in co-maintenance.
> Nor does it seem the case with alot of other fedora desktop packages.
> If you want to look at other main line desktop packages that don't
> seem to have active maintainer ship look at the webkit thread from the
> last day or so. And there are others that come to mind that don't seem
> to be actively maintained.

I haven't "moved on". 

In contrast to PA systemd is a project whith an "end". i.e. there's a
certain point not so far away, where it is "complete", i.e. where it
will go into maintaince mode where additional features will be added
only every now and then. This is different for PA which is basically an
"endless" project where constantly a module for a new policy, a new
device type, a new effect, a new codec, or other piece of infrastructure
will have to be added and worked on.

It's basically the dichotomy of "cat" vs. a text editor. When "cat" is
implemented, then there's very little to add to it over the years. OTOH
text editors will gain features all the time.

I have been working continously on PA and related techs for the last
years. And now I have this smaller side project called "systemd", whose
feature set is already complete. What's missing is cleaning it up for
the distros and fixing the bugs. When that is done I will return
full-time to work on PA.

So, I guess what I want to say is: I will return full-time to PA not so
far away. And I have a queue of patches in my checkout (including volume
ramping and plug-in effects and similar). Also note that I'll run the
track about audio at plumbersconf again, so there's really no reason to
believe that I moved on or PA was dead.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.