[Cooker] ANNOUNCE : Sound server for 2008.1

[Frederic Crozat]

Hi everybody,

following various tests we made internally on both GNOME and KDE front
(most of the finding have been already sent on cooker mailing list last
week and this week), we have now reached a decision regarding Sound
Server for Mandriva Linux 2008.1.

Drum roll ....

Suspense ...

we are going to switch to  ... PulseAudio !

(ok, ok, I guess you saw it coming :)

More seriously, switching to PulseAudio will allow us to maybe fix the
various issues many people have been complaining for year on Linux about
sound support.

Our current plan is the following :
- move pulseaudio and all needed packages to cooker/main (most of it is
already there)
- make sure all programs which are supporting natively PulseAudio are
configured to use it by default.
- preconfigure alsa to use PulseAudio alsa plugin when the correct
package is installed
- preconfigure KDE (ie Arts) to use PulseAudio (I'm not sure yet if it
is best to use the esound compat layer or the ALSA plugin, since both
works)
- modify our esound package to split the sound server and the tools and
enable PA esound compatibility wrapper
- create a task-pulseaudio package which would act as drop-in to install
all the various packages needed to get PA working out of the box
- install task-pulseaudio by default on cooker

One important thing to remember is we don't want to hardcode PA
everywhere. I think some people might want to disable PA so, when it is
possible, we shouldn't enforce PA but rely on framework autodetection.

I've created a meta-bug for PulseAudio transition
(http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=35933 ) and I'll separate bugs
for all the tasks listed above. People finding issues in PA or with
programs running with PA should add their bug as blocking to this
metabug.

I'd also like to thanks Colin Guthrie for his work on PA packaging and
taking care of relation with PA upstream. Keep the good work ;)

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat@mandriva.com>
Mandriva