Comment 263 for bug 371897

(In reply to comment #157)
> 6) Once the Wine sound infrastructure is fixed, we can monitor the situation
> and see where the Linux sound development leads to. If PulseAudio is
> nevertheless replaced with SpeedAudio in 2 years, punch some distro maintainers
> in the face. If PulseAudio remains the sound server of choice, but most other
> apps keep talking to it via the Alsa interface, stick to winealsa.drv, same if
> PA is dropped in favor of plain alsa+dmix. If PulseAudio is used pretty much
> everywhere, and all other apps use it, add a winepulse.drv and drop
> winealsa.drv. I think we should only add a pulse driver if it can either be
> shown that there are issues that can't be fixed with alsa by design, or if we
> can drop winealsa in exchange.

Dropping winealsa would annoy everyone who has a *REAL* soundcard, has no need for pulse, and uses a distribution that hasn't already forced pulse down the users' throats.

You could argue a similar case for winejack - either drop winealsa in favour of winejack (because jack can be used on top of alsa without problems) or drop winejack in favour of winealsa (because winejack is generally unmaintained and buggy).

The only case where winealsa should be dropped is if some other driver (e.g. pulse) provides a hybrid winefoo/winealsa support, which would defeat the purpose of having *any* different sound drivers IMO. It's my understanding that the winepulse driver should use libpulse calls and not libalsa calls to do everything.