Pulseaudio : lots of issues, how can I help?

[Les Mikesell]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Tue, 23.09.08 10:54, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski (dominik at greysector.net) wrote:
> 
>>>> Do you mean Open Source Software or Open Sound System? In case of OSS,
>>>> it's realy a shame, because it was (and still is) a great piece of software
>>>> with nice API and doesn't require any external libraries like ALSA.
>>>> But you can't compare console/X to OSS/ALSA. The latter provide functionality
>>> I must correct you: the OSS API sucks. And ALSA is certainly a far
>>> greater piece of software than OSS ever was, and among the reasons is
>>> precisely the fact that it is a proper library instead of some fucked up kernel
>>> interface based on ioctls().
>>>
>>> Everyone hates ioctl()s. The kernel people do. The userspace people
>>> too. An API for application usage that is based around ioctl()s is
>>> thus mandatorily a big failure.
>> The people whose opinion I value disagree. I have no strong opinion
>> of my own, because I never wrote code to interface with either ALSA
>> or OSS.
> 
> Oh my. So you know someone who thinks that ioctl()s are ingenious API
> design? You probably should choose your friends more carefully, then. ;-)

They are nicely minimalistic in that they permit device-specific 
operations to be passed to a driver without waiting for some 
overly-bulky generalized intermediate API that thinks it knows what 
every device/driver might ever need to do.  The down side is that it is 
very hard to subsequently decouple the application from the device - for 
example to let it use a remote device on a machine with different 
bit/byte ordering.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com