Wine Developers Fight Over PulseAudio Driver

It's not yet time for another Wine development release, but there's a heated discussion to point out on the development list concerning a PulseAudio driver for Wine.

Maarten Lankhorst, a contributor to both the Nouveau project and Wine, had written a PulseAudio driver for Wine. Andrew Eikum of CodeWeavers then constructed a new PulseAudio driver based upon the original driver by Lankhorst.

This second PulseAudio driver has angered Lankhorst. "This doesn't look like an attempt to get my driver in, it looks like a rewrite by someone who doesn't understand why I made the design decisions I made for correctness...I genuinely do want a good driver to go in, but this just isn't it...If this is going to be accepted (likely, sadly) I want to have this added to the commit: Rejected-by: Maarten Lankhorst."

Maarten ended his frustrated email with "Still sad that you chose to reject my original driver not based on any merits."

PulseAudio has caused problems for Wine due to very high latencies, with some independent users reporting Maarten's driver is providing lower latencies than Andrew's modified driver. There's also some other Wine audio problems.

Those wishing to look closer at winepulse.drv, the Wine PulseAudio driver implementation, see the many PulseAudio messages on the wine-devel mailing list. (The threading seems to be broken for these messages from their mailing list archive, but Anzwix pointed this out as being an interesting topic for Phoronix.)