Is PulseAudio dead?

[pbrobinson at gmail.com]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 2:06 AM, Lennart Poettering <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 02.08.10 23:50, pbrobinson at gmail.com (pbrobinson at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>> > 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.
>
> Audio hackers unfortunately don't grow on trees. In my counting, there
> are 3 people paid in the whole industry who work on general purpose
> audio infrastructure of Linux. Two of them are basically busy with
> keeping the HDA driver up-to-date, if I am correctly informed. The third
> one is me.
>
> As long as things are that way the entire weight of fixing bugs all
> across our consumer audio stack are basically lying on three pairs of
> shoulders, and that defines the speed in which we process bugs. So,
> please be patient.
>
> One would wish that a certain other company with a clear focus on
> desktop Linux (where consumer audio is a key part of) would want to
> actually hire more folks in this area, but well, ...
>
> I not sure whether it should be considered a failure of us consumer
> audio hackers that we never managed to attract a bigger number of core
> contributors. But well, I am not a Jono Bacon, and I have done quite a
> number of talks about PA and related techs on many conferences, both
> about the technical details and from a more user-related
> perspective. While I like to believe that people did enjoy my talks they
> didn't really have the effect of boasting the numbers of core hackers of
> our audio infrastructure.
>
> Audio hacking is often quite complex unfortunately. You need to have a
> basic idea of signal processsing and RT stuff. The code involved is time
> critical and usually very low-level. That makes the learning curve
> steep, and doesn't help growing audio hackers.
>
> Then again, something similar can probably be written about every other
> part of our Linux infrastructure. I am still waiting for the project
> that doesn't have too feww, but too many people making contributions
> ;-).
>
> But anyway. We have come quite far in the last years, and I actually
> think the status quo is not bad at all anymore. I have a pretty
> positive view on things, so while it of course would be great if we
> could fix all open bugs tomorrow, I don't think it should be considered
> a catastrophic desaster if we didn't.

I think we've done very well over the last couple of years. There's
also the MeeGo to go with the Ubuntu and no doubt suse and other
distros. But I was more talking about people that know a little that
can assist in QA and triage of bugs rather than core develops.

Peter