Comment 388 for bug 371897

Yes it is about politics. But the world is changing over the years. Politics should react on changing facts.

There are several major changes which should make Wine (aka Alexandre) rethink.

1) It is now clear that PulseAudio is not just one more audio system but it is the mainstream audio system in LINUX.

Is it mixing, using of bluetooth or whatsoever. Users simply want to plug in their device and it should work. When I hear music and a telephone call comes in the music should be muted etc. There simply is no alternative available which could serve all the required use cases better.

All major Apps do now support PulseAudio at least good enough. Is it Skype or Flash or whatsoever. With one exception: Wine

PulseAudio is still not one for all, e.g. for low latency you should fall back to JACK, but it fulfills the 99% usage. Professional audio users and hard core system geeks might not want to use PulseAudio. But for those it is acceptable to change or build their system the way they need it. By the way, JACK and PulseAudion did solve their interoperability issues, thus there is no need to deinstall PulseAudio when you need to use JACK.

It is ridiculous to ask ordinary mainstream users to rebuild the hart of their system to use Wine with proper sound.

And it is ridiculous to wait for some magical fix of PulseAudio Alsa. This was discussed and this will never happen. It is technical nonsense.

2) Wine is officially on release 1.0 and higher. Thus it is not a construction site for some freaks but a mainstream tool. Functionality is the key. As long total cost of development is in a acceptable relation it is more important than long term design issues. When Wine waits for the big bang for the audio sub systems, functionality will suffer for several more years.

On the other hand there is working code, ready to use, proven in real life with a dev willing to maintain.