On 2017-03-22 19:34, Botond Ballo wrote:
Now that this change has hit the release channel, we've started
receiving feedback from a wider range of users, a lot of it in bug
1345661 [1].
I believe the feedback in that thread brings some new information to
the table that we weren't aware of when this decision was made:
- Based on the volume of the feedback we received, and the number
of duplicate bugs and so on, it appears that quoted telemetry data
underestimates the number of users who use ALSA. This is
corroborated by the fact that some of the affected distributions
disable telemetry in their Firefox packages.
I was under the impression that the telemetry said it was over 1%. If
all of those start to report that it's broken, you will get a lot of
reports. I also thinking breaking more than 1% of the users setup is way
too high.
I've also reported that certain desktop environments don't come with
pulseaudio by default.
The FAQ seems to suggest that telemetry is only enabled in the
pre-release versions and not in the release versions. I assume there is
a bias that is caused by this.
- A number of users, particularly those in the audiophile and music
production / recording communities, report technical reasons for
preferring ALSA over PulseAudio.
- We've had an offer from someone to volunteer to maintain the
ALSA backend (bug 1345661 comment 52 [2]).
Pulseaudio is really a layer between the application and alsa. If
pulseaudio can do something it should be possible to do the same with
alsa. But maybe pulseaudio makes certain things easier, I don't know.
In any case, alsa is supported on any linux version, while it's clear
that for various reasons pulseaudio is not. It makes sense to me to
support alsa, and maybe only alsa. As I understand it, if you only
support alsa and the user is using pulseaudio you still end up using
pulseaudio.
Kurt
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