Is PulseAudio dead?

[pbrobinson at gmail.com]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 11:37 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> 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.

Which is great and I understand that but systemd will basically cover
the release time frame for F-13 and F-14 and in that timeframe the
support and issues for PA are going unfixed or even un triaged. Not
great for a core sub system. So maybe it would be a good idea to train
up a few people that can do the boring trage so you can get on with
the upstream PA and systemd stuff so that the average end user doesn't
need to wait for the bottle neck of a single person because presumably
with other distros using it Fedora isn't the only distro demanding
your time.

Peter