[Jack-Devel] debian jack/pulse support [ was : Re: JACK in Chrome !! ]

I haven't read all of this thread, but there are a few things I want to 
point out.

1) The audio group is not added on Ubuntu, because the "audio" group 
name is already used for another incompatible feature, i e, that of 
being able to exclusively access a sound card even though you are not 
logged in. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/TheAudioGroup for details.

2) Two patches were just pushed into the PulseAudio repository, that 
helps with the handover between PulseAudio and jackd2, at least on my 
machine here. Whether that is enough to make things work on other 
machines too, or if there are more issues to sort out, I don't know that 
right now.

3) The pulseaudio-module-jack package, that connects PulseAudio and jack 
in terms of one outputting audio to the other (not the handover!), is 
not installed by default because there is no way (AFAIK) to tell the 
package system to "automatically install package C if and only if both 
of A and B are installed".

4) I once had the idea that if you plugged in a Firewire card, udev 
rules could make jackd automatically start, PulseAudio would detect this 
and make connections to jackd. This way you could just fire up your 
media player and it would output to your Firewire sound card just fine. 
I never finished this (due to change of priorities), and never sorted 
all the issues out. But this was the basis for writing the 
module-jackdbus-detect module, which detects whether jackdbus is running 
or not.

5) IMO, what we Linux Audio developers need is a greater unification of 
what we want to accomplish and how, and more people with skill and time 
to make that happen. Complaining might help to some degree - at least 
it's better to complain than to just silently walk away in despair - but 
what we really need is more manpower, and skilled manpower.


-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic

1358422361.3861_0.ltw:2,a <50F7E153.8040402 at canonical dot com>