I've decided to stop working for Canonical, and with that, I intend to ramp down my contributions to PulseAudio, on both upstream and Ubuntu levels. I could have stayed as a volunteer, but in fact I've been a bit frustrated over some of PulseAudio's design choices for quite some time. Maybe some of those choices were right at the time when they were made, but they make us a not good enough fit for tomorrow. From one end comes the embedded ASoC drivers, who have never heard of timer-based scheduling, but can reconfigure themselves to decode mp3 in hardware. From the other end come sandboxed apps, and the security requirements that come with it. And routing - we tried, but we never got that right. It's been difficult, not only due to all use cases and different demands and ideas from different groups of people, but also due to the way PulseAudio is built up internally. In software nothing is impossible, but to re-architecture PulseAudio to support all of these requirements in a good way (rather than to "build another layer on top", which in the long run would make the PulseAudio even more difficult to maintain) would be very difficult, so my judgment is that it would be easier to write something new from scratch. And I do think it would be possible to write something that took the best from PulseAudio, JACK, and AudioFlinger, and get something that would work well for both mobile and desktop; for pro-audio, gaming, low-power music playback, etc. I have been tempted to try; but knowing that it would be a huge undertaking, and I don't know any company who would like to provide funding for such a project, I'm not likely to get very far. Which is a shame, because I think we, as an open source community, could have great use for such a sound server. All the best, David
