Comment 433 for bug 371897

Revision history for this message
Andrew Eikum (aeikum) wrote :

This Bugzilla cross-integration thing really confuses me (Comments to Wine bugzilla appear here _first_???), so I'm just going to post replies here since I understand how that works.

> Still waiting for the day at which those damn political
> discussions stop and all refocus on making things
> work better instead of intentional keeping broken parts
> broken.
> I'm tired of pointless political battles preventing me
> to use my computer the way i would like it to do.

There's nothing political going on here. Audio drivers take a good amount of work to write, and every time we need to make a change to the drivers, that change needs to be replicated across all of the drivers. We already have three audio drivers in Wine. Adding another is a significant increase in maintenance work, not to mention more complication for users and when reporting bugs, so we're avoiding it as much as possible. PulseAudio supports ALSA programs through the alsa-plugins Pulse PCM device, so we use the ALSA driver in Wine to support PulseAudio. If something doesn't work in that chain, it's a bug. No politics, just real life.

The issue you're seeing there is caused by your old alsa-plugins version. The 10.10 package list[1] shows that alsa-plugins is at version 1.0.23 on your OS. This version doesn't support the "handle_underrun" option[2]. However, the ALSA developers bafflingly decided that unknown configuration options should result in device failure. So, you have no sound when we set that option.

That leaves us in an ugly situation. If we choose not to give the handle_underrun option if it's unsupported by your alsa-plugins version, then your audio will break anyway after a few minutes due to a PulseAudio bug[3]. If we leave the option in, then your audio just outright won't work, as you see here. So really the only solution is for you to upgrade your alsa-plugins version (and, obviously, its dependencies) to at least 1.0.24, which is the minimum version that supports handle_underrun. In reality, that probably means moving on from 10.10.

[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/libasound2-plugins
[2] http://git.alsa-project.org/alsa-plugins.git
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-plugins/+bug/805940