I've talked to a few people today, and nobody seems strongly opposed to
migrating PulseAudio ASAP [1], i e have a PulseAudio based on the
upcoming/planned 1.0 release of PulseAudio, rather than the existing
0.23 release.
In short, here's the plan:
1) Colin Guthrie has promised to release 0.99.1 of PulseAudio, a "beta
test" release before the end of Tuesday (today!).
2) Chris Van Hoof has promised to contribute some (delegated) resources
to help out with testing the new release during this week.
3) Assuming testing goes well, we'll do the actual migration in 11.10
early next week.
About the package:
My suggestion is that we base the package of the 0.99.1 release, at
least for the time being. We can then distro patch jack detection
features on top of that (and UCM?), and possibly other patches as well.
If/when later releases come out (e g 0.99.2 or 1.0) we can select
whether we want to rebase on top of that release, or just apply the
patches from git that differs. The 0.99.1 will be packaged in (yet
another!) separate PPA until the actual migration is done.
About the testing:
We have two options here - either use the above package, which is
probably better if it is ready, but if it is not, we can use the daily
builds for testing. (The differences are not going to big enough to
block start of testing.)
Colin has put some notes here: http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/Notes/0.99
To start with a current snapshot of 11.10 is recommended, but 11.04 can
be used if 11.10 is not working on the current machine, or other
troubles arise.
Please report testing results to me. I'll forward to interested people
(say "yes" now if you're interested!) If you find a bug that only
appears with the new version of PulseAudio, I don't mind being pinged on
IRC for some quick triaging, but email works fine as well.
As for what to test, apart from what's listed in the "Testing 1.0"
section in the 0.99 wiki notes, diversity and imagination in both
hardware and software is important. Try to stress test PA a little -
start several streams, try passthrough, move streams, record and play
back simultaneously (e g voip), record a monitoring source. For
hardware, try normal cards as well as USB, Bluetooth, JACK sinks,
network sources or whatever makes sense in your environment.
Does this make sense to everyone?
