[Mageia-dev] Pulseaudio push vs version freeze

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Anne nicolas at 12/03/12 21:59 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi there
> 
> After all discussions about pulseaudio that happened on IRC and on this
> mailing-list, we had to take a decision about submitting or not this new
> version. Version freeze is a MUST to follow to be able to release
> stable. We know it's hard to stop updating software and focus on bug
> fixing while development of these softwares do not stop upstream.
> 
> Anyway Colin gave some details about the reasons why we should submit
> it. There was discussion during council meeting tonight and finally here
> is the plan: pulseaudio is submitted tonight, it will be included in
> beta2 and it will be tested until 26/03. Colin will provide
> documentation to help tests. If we see regression in between, then it
> will be reverted.

I just want to follow up Anne's email here.

I want to make it clear this I was very much the person pushing for
this. Several people are somewhat apprehensive about this (for various
values of apprehensive) and I fully appreciate their concerns.

By way of reassurance, I would like to describe a little the changes in
the upstream version.

This release is technically quite small. The number of commits are low
generally, but also a high proportion of the commits are related to
documentation, tidyups and independent new features (requiring manual
activation) rather than changes to current feature set.

Where changes to current features do exist, a lot of it relates to two
newer APIs/subsystems which are still relatively minor parts: namely the
passthrough API and the echo-cancellation subsystem. While these are
important parts and will play an increasingly important role moving
forward, they are also not part of what I would call the "critical path"
of PA usage today.

So in terms of changes that are part of that critical path, I'd say two
primary changes come into play here:
 * Alternative Sample Rates
 * Headphone Jack Detection

Both of these are issues that the users have often requested, but it is
the latter that is my primary motivation for pushing for this new
version to be included.

The vast majority of the work has been undertaken by David Henningsson
of Canonical. A variation on his patches have been part of Ubuntu for
some time and they have offered users this capability for a while now. I
would very much like to thank David for his work here. It's been a
sorely needed feature and it's been a lot of work and he's done a great job.




So the primary things to look out for here are:

 1. General regressions. Does something that used to work, now function
poorly? I do not expect much here. Things relating to actual quality of
the audio should also be reported (in some cases some optimisations
might not be working as intended, but this is a relatively simple to fix
if it crops up).

 2. Do headphones now work correctly? You should now always see a port
dropdown in pavucontrol. This was often hidden in the past, but will now
be visible. On HDA codecs, does plugging/unplugging headphones now
magically switch the port correctly? If not, is it any worse than
before? You should have separate volumes for normal usage vs. headphones
usage. Depending on hardware you may get a slight blip when plugging in
the headphones (e.g. if the speaker volume is loud, and the headphone
volume quiet, you might get a very short blast of loud noise when you
plug in headphones). Some hardware permits genuinely separate controls
for this and avoids this blip. If so, you're lucky.

 3. Bluetooth devices. There are a few bluetooth changes. Everything
still OK? You will have to add "Enable=Socket" to the [General] section
of /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf to get this working, but it should work
fine as before.


That's all really. As always, please include "pacmd ls" output in any
reports.

Obviously for minor issues I hope to fix them super quickly, but if any
issues come up that cannot be addressed, I can and will revert back to
PA 1.1 for mga2.


All the best and thank you very much for helping make this a great release.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
Open Source:
  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/