Am Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:58:31 +0100 schrieb Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>:
Sounds like possibly valid concerns. But this is not something to discuss here. Please contact gnome and/or pulseaudio if you have issues.
This has already been tried at least with pulseaudio. Their reactions are known. Blame ALSA for PA's faults while ALSA supports those card perfectly since years, and crippling those audio cards down to stereo with some very strange ALSA configs, because PA's upstream just doesn't have the knowledge about those cards and about pro-audio. Maybe I'm not the best to explain the concepts of those audio cards, but that doesn't mean that I don't know anything about them. When I bought this card it took me a while until I got to know what they are doing and how they work, so maybe I can't explain it in detail. But that doesn't mean that I'm missing anything.
We just package their software, we don't decide their priorities or policies.
But you and the developers of the other distributions are the people who decide if they just want to package what upstream thinks should become a standard. So if every distribution just install PA as a dependency then nothing will change and a very big regression regarding audio will happen, because PA will indeed become a standard, and no pro-audio user will be able to hear and work with sound anymore. If the distros refuse to package those bad software dependencies, then also upstream probably has to change their minds. So I think this has to be discussed with downstream, too.
And I think this discussion has gone on for way too long...
Think about it again. Think again why this discussion about PA always pops up on every occasion in almost every mailing list and forum. Rethink if pro-audio users really have no knowledge about the underlying concepts. I bet pro-audio users have a lot more knowledge than PA upstream and all the people who claim that pro-audio users are missing something. I'm sure that this discussion will always pop up until these issues regarding PA are fixed. That said, it will end if either PA will fully support those audio cards and show that they learned about (pro-)audio or if PA wouldn't be installed as a dependency anymore by upstream as well as by downstream of all distros and just be treated as a normal and optional piece of software which can but doesn't need to be installed and used. Heiko