Pulseaudio *sigh*

[Martin T. Sandsmark]

Just to clarify; I'm not even a Kubuntu user (I use ArchLinux), just a 
“concerned citizen”, so to speak.

On Monday 22. June 2009 01:48:48 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> Even if the idea behind Pulseaudio is interesting, it's implementation
> is far from perfect (and I am polite here....) I have the impression
> to be back in the old times where we had to struggle with
> arts....*shudder*

I'm just wondering exactly which problem is it that Pulseaudio is supposed to 
solve? I thought that people understood (after aRts) that adding a sound 
server to the audio stack wasn't the way to go (after all, aRts did pretty 
much everything PA tries to do, and from what I've seen so far, it did it 
better). Granted, my experience with PulseAudio is limited to helping people 
uninstall it, and seeing everything suddenly work like it's supposed to. Is 
there some magic killer feature it provides that I'm unaware of? (I'm talking 
for normal end users, I have no doubt that PulseAudio is excellent for thin 
clients.)


Also, I don't think using the gstreamer Phonon backend as default is a very 
good idea either. Since Qt moved to gitorious (3 months ago), there hasn't 
been a single commit to it in their git repo. And there's only been trivial 
commits in the KDE svn repo in the same timespan (mostly by scripty, one 
compile fix by thiago, a one-line patch and partial support for cdda added by 
jbache). There might have been a sudden surge of activity right before that, 
but I kind of doubt that.

To compare; in the same timespan in phonon-xine there's been several bug fixes 
and an equalizer and video frame grabbing support added, by several different 
contributors.


PS: Please remember to CC either me or amarok-devel at k.o, as I'm not on 
kubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com.

-- 
martin t. sandsmark