Not critical because we are taking a longer view than you Oli Warner. Many sound servers have been included in wine no more. Wasted many man hours that wine cannot get back. For the time being pulseaudio can be removed from systems. That is a good enough patch for 7 months or people like you could decide to run 2.6.32 kernel when it gets released in December this year only 2 months off with cuse provided. By the time Ubuntu is releasing most of the issue will be gone. Already distributions like fedora ship with cuse enabled. So not every distribution with pulseaudio is blocked from using the Ossp solution now. You could also choose to swap to a distribution that includes cuse. Basically we are in transition to the cuse solution by all distributions so we don't need to do a thing. Ubuntu might pick it up earlier if users request cuse support. That Pulseaudio is going to become a tombstone there is less importance to us to waste time on it. History is important we have wasted time fixing stuff we should have just let go threw to keeper. Something you don't know is wine alsa driver contains work around for pulseaudio issues due to pulseaudio faults in the alsa interface. So why split effort. Some issues are pulseaudio internal changing to direct pulseaudio interface will not cure. There is no point us splitting development. Lets say we add the pulseaudio driver. Coders would have to split there time between OSS ALSA and Pulseaudio so leading to poorer quality of output for all.
