If Luicd ia a LTS......

[Daniel Chen]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 12:07 PM, schoappied <schoappied at gmail.com> wrote:
> We all remembered the failure of Hardy as LTS.

Firstly, I am going to warn you up front that this response will seem
largely defensive, because I have not seen any contributions from you
in Lucid's sound stack integration. I am happy to stand corrected,
however. That said --

Seriously? "Failure"? Granted, there are integration problems (still,
thanks to derivatives choosing not to ship PulseAudio by default) in
8.04.y and 10.04, but to call the former a failure based on foolhardy
perception is rather...foolhardy. Yes, some (non-trivial number) have
issues with their sound drivers. However, plenty of people are using
Hardy on their desktops with nary a concern. And let's not count the
server users, though I don't think you were precisely arguing that
point. (At least I hope you weren't.)

> Bleeding edge sound server Pulseaudio as default (sound horror). Stupid
> decision imo to implement such a thing in a LTS release. Beta version of
> Firefox installed (browsing horror). Stupid decision imo to release a
> LTS with a beta browser.

Those decisions were not made lightly. Given the scope of upstream
support for those programs, they were the right way forward.

> At that time the public opinion about Windows Vista was very negative,
> but Ubuntu missed the chance there and released a LTS version which was
> not ready for the Desktop. The pulseaudio problems are not even really
> solved atm (many maudio cards didn't work with pulseaudio on Ubuntu
> 9.10). Let's pray they have fixed it when Lucid comes out and that they
> never ever will such Hardy mistakes again!

It's highly probable that your poster child, M-Audio cards, will
require manual configuration in 10.04 as well. It's well-documented on
the Ubuntu wiki under the KarmicCaveats page linked from
DebuggingSoundProblems. The point is that neither upstream [ALSA,
PulseAudio] has agreed on a fix. All we have are workarounds that make
[both] upstream[s] unhappy. You might argue that it's better to ship a
better user experience out of the box -- and I won't precisely
disagree -- but volunteer distributors and maintainers have to balance
support lifetimes and correctness with evolving codebases. I hope you
understand that shoehorning a workaround is not the right approach,
particularly not for an LTS.

> There are signs that they learned a bit. Lucid seems to be based on
> Debian testing and JACK seems to be in main now, which makes it more
> easy to use Jack with pulseaudio for instance...

Yes, yes, let's blast people for being slow to learn. You are
forgetting that the difficult work of integrating these bits was done
largely by community members who grew tired of people such as yourself
just whinging. Please, if you want something to work, pitch in and
help fix it.