PulseAudio and sound apps (was: Re: Orphaning a few packages)

[Kevin Kofler]

Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> I re-orphaned portaudio. I see that it is patched to work with
> pulseaudio, which, I think, must be banned from the surface of Earth.
> I am not planning to maintain a package with such a patch.

PulseAudio is the default sound solution in Fedora, so all packages using
sound SHOULD support it.

IMHO, we should:
* find some solution for JACK apps to work out of the box, without
reconfiguring PulseAudio to work on top of JACK. Maybe this involves
running JACK on top of PulseAudio (something which currently doesn't work
because JACK does not support non-mmap ALSA devices nor the native
PulseAudio protocol), maybe this involves starting up JACK when needed and
having it load the JACK modules into PulseAudio and rerouting running
PulseAudio streams to JACK at runtime (which can be done without
interrupting the PulseAudio streams - the problem with that solution is
that it breaks support for multiple output devices, which work just fine
when using PulseAudio directly), maybe something else, but in any case a
solution is needed to make things just work.
* once that's done, make it a requirement that sound MUST work with
PulseAudio without manual configuration. PulseAudio MUST be the default in
all sound-using applications. JACK SHOULD only be used if PulseAudio (and
any of the compatible APIs, e.g. ALSA, ESD etc.) is not supported (and as I
explained above, it needs to interoperate with PulseAudio more than it
currently does). Likewise, aRts (the deprecated KDE 3 sound server) SHOULD
only be used if outputting directly to PulseAudio is not possible.

It makes no sense to have a sound server configured by default and then have
assorted applications not working with it. It also makes no sense to have a
whole set of applications (JACK-using applications) require manual
reconfiguration of the system according to a readme file shipped with the
jack-audio-connection-kit package to even work at all.

        Kevin Kofler