ubuntu-audio-dev team mailing list archive

[David Henningsson <david.henningsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: PulseAudio - stable-queue or master for Oneiric?
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:46:58 +0100
From: Colin Guthrie <gmane@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: David Henningsson <david.henningsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: ubuntu-audio-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

'Twas brillig, and David Henningsson at 16/06/11 10:44 did gyre and gimble:
> As I want to start developing the jack detection and get all of that in
> place well in time for Oneiric, I guess it is time to decide or revisit
> this question.
>
> I feel a little caught between upstream; who mostly develops new
> features in master and could use some help with testing etc, and our
> first duty, which is towards our users - and we definitely don't want an
> unstable PulseAudio.
>
> A few months ago I was hoping for master to stabilise sooner than later,
> but from what I can tell, it currently seems they are no closer to
> releasing 1.0 than they were a few months ago. :-( E g, just a few weeks
> ago a new (mandatory!) dependency was added, so features are still in
> development. (And btw, that means one more library, json-c, to support,
> maintain and ensure stability in.)

In fairness, this was one of the things we discussed at our meeting a in
March and was a known branch that was to be merged before 1.0. This was
all decided quite a while back, so it should not have come as a surprise.

We're still waiting for reviews on one branch I've outstanding (your
input is, as always most welcome there) and then we are feature complete
for v1.0. And we'll start on preview releases for stabilisation.

I had hoped this would be ready by now, but the reviews on the branch
have not been overly detailed yet and I'm looking for more feedback. So
poke Arun and Tanu and yourself so we can get more eyes on it!

> Also, we really don't know how stable the two versions are (and even
> less, know how stable they both will be in September-October!), and I'm
> not sure how we can make a reasonably qualified guess.

I've been running git master for some time and it's mostly stable here.
I've got a few edge cases that are still cropping up but on the whole
it's fine. I've fixed several problems that have crept in over the cycle
so I'm mostly quite happy. The snags I've found are on the list.

> But just to have a plan, what do you think of the following:
>  * If PulseAudio releases 1.0 (from the master branch) before end of
> July, we'll consider it, and re-evaluate the situation. Later than end
> of July, it'd be too late to switch, as Alpha 3 and FeatureFreeze are in
> the beginning of August [1].
>  * Stick with stable-queue and for now, assume we're stuck with it for
> Oneiric.
>
> What do you think? Opinions? Comments?

While I obviously cannot comment on your cycles, I'd very much suggest
that 1.0 (or perhaps v2 or v3 by then as I'm planning for a much more
rapid release cycle after v1 lands) would be the best approach for the
next Ubuntu. I'm certainly going to be pushing it in the distros I look
after and the more people debugging it, the more stable it is for the
rest of us.

Col


--

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
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/]