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Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore
halfaperson writes "In an interview with LinuxFr.org, Lennart Poettering speaks freely about his creations, PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd among other things. Naturally, what has stirred up most of the discussions online is Lennart's opinions on BSD. Following the recent proposal to make Gnome a Linux-exclusive desktop, Lennart explains that he thinks BSD support is holding back a lot of Free Software development. He says this while also taking a stab at Debian kFreeBSD: 'Debian kFreeBSD is a toy OS, people really shouldn't misunderstand that.'"
This guy needs beaten just for this.
Too bad they didn't port the FreeBSD audio. It actually works.
now we know.
the developer lacks humility.
It's interesting that the question implies that Linux is leading the charge in defining new APIs. Everything listed has a FreeBSD equivalent that predates the linux version:
cgroups -> jails
udev -> devfs
fanotify, timerfd, signalfd -> kqueue
Of course, the Linux developers decided to reinvent them all making compatibility impossible. I guess you could argue that the Linux versions offer some extra features over the FreeBSD versions, but from a user and developer perspective, the FreeBSD versions seem more complete and stable (see jails vs cgroups).
kc8apf
Poettering is a zealot for a religious cause. It has nothing to do with truth or facts or even logic. His chief gripe isn't actually that BSD isn't keeping up with Linux, it's that BSD does things different from Linux and he doesn't like it. He tries to spin different as not keeping pace, but that's based on the assumption that the way he wants to do things is the One True Way. Mind you, he says this while simultaneously and purposely trying to keep BSD out of the party by refusing any and all compatibility patches that would make his One True Way usable on BSD.
Amazingly, the BSD people have a way of fixing this crap themselves. It's just more of a pain in the ass when people like Poettering actively work against their efforts.
I hate audio demons. These crutches never worked properly and never will. Someone needs to actually make a lot of absolutely breaking changes to ALSA. Why?
When I plug in my USB headphones in Windows, all programs using default audio output automatically move from my 5.1 speakers (onboard sound) to the headphones the moment I plug them in. When I pull the plug, the reverse happens automatically. It just works! MacOS supposedly behaves the exact same way.
On Linux, this is broken in ways you cannot even imagine. When I plug in the USB headphones after booting, they are treated as the second sound card (hw:1) when everything uses the first one (hw:0) by default. So in order to have anything use the headphones I have to reconfigure the applications one by one and probably restart them (xine needs a restart). Same when I change back. When I leave the USB headphones in when booting, it is totally random which sound device will be hw:0 and which will hw:1. Great. To make matters worse, when I leave the webcam plugged in, the internal microphone also gets registered as a different sound device. Plus, when it is plugged in when booting it gets a number one below the headset. So sometimes the webcam microphone ends up as hw:0 during boot and every program attempting to use hw:0 as output device will throw up confusing error messages about how everything stopped working (if they even detect that). A normal user would have given up on this mess already!
The really proper fix would be the following: break the ALSA interface in a big way: don't number sound devices, but name them after the hardware they contain (not the bus location, esp. in the case of USB devices), and make the current default device queryable somehow. Programs must then query ALSA for the default device and be aware that this may change at any moment. ALSA must be extended by a mechanism to report such changes to programs, which absolutely have to respond to this in order to not crash and burn (it'll be a PITA for the programmers, but it's absolutely necessary to enforce all of this). Also, ALSA must be able to report the speaker configuration connected to a certain device.
Why? Programs that are capable of generating two or more channels of output sound need to be aware of how many channels are going to be audible. It's not enought to know that the sound device has a 5.1 analog output. It is equally important to know whether all outputs are actually connected to speakers (e.g. a headphone connected to the onboard 5.1 analog output) or the program will play sound on channels that are inaudible and will not be heard by the user. Really great programs even should distinguish between stereo speakers and headphones or different setups for the same set of speakers (I guess most OSS Linux app devs won't even know why that is). Automatic downmixing inside ALSA when the output channel count decreases on a device change should not happen because the program almost always has additional information and thus can do a better job.
I know that programmers will cringe when they read this because it makes using ALSA much more difficult, but that's what is missing to get consumer desktop audio up to par on Linux.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/