Last month’s noteworthy things: a bunch of patch reviews and a few small bug fixes. And a PipeWire hackfest happened!
Reviews:
- A couple of tests for passthrough functionality, by Arun Raghavan. Also, the null sink got support for non-PCM audio formats, so that the tests don’t depend on any particular hardware.
- A bunch of cleanup patches from João Paulo Rechi Vita.
- Some routing fixes from João Paulo Rechi Vita. These were not accepted at least in the current form, and it remains somewhat unclear to me what specific problems the patches try to address. Some or all of the patches may be rendered redundant by ongoing work by Hui Wang to revamp the stream routing code (the main objective of that work is to automatically move streams away from sinks whose all ports have been unplugged).
- Fix for user switching with bluetooth, by Arnaud Rebillout. Handing over bluetooth device access when switching from one user to another is pretty badly broken, and has caused trouble for a long time, so this patch is very welcome. The first version had some issues that need to be fixed, hopefully Arnaud will submit a new version soon.
- Installation path fixes when using the Meson build system, by Arun Raghavan. Some issues need to be fixed before merging.
Fixes:
- The development version of pavucontrol has been crashing for a long time for me, but I haven’t investigated it very far, because it seemed to work for other people and the backtrace looked like I’d have to dig into GTK internals. Now there have been crash reports from others as well, so I took a better look. It wasn’t that difficult to debug after all – the issue seemed to be with a Window object, and after a while I figured out that the MainWindow pointer was being used without properly initializing it first. Initializing the pointer got rid of the crash.
- It had been reported that setting the “avoid-resampling” configuration option didn’t have any effect. It turned out that the option worked fine, the issue was just that the “pulseaudio –dump-conf” command was printing the boolean value inverted.
- I submitted patches (not reviewed yet) that make it possible to use line out while having headphones plugged in.
At the end of October there was a PipeWire hackfest in Edinburgh. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, PipeWire is a new daemon that was originally created for handling just video, but the scope expanded to handle audio as well, and probably MIDI too. The ambitious goal is now to replace both PulseAudio and JACK, and I was invited to the hackfest to help with planning the transition. So basically I was there to plan how to make my job obsolete 😉 It was all in good spirit, nevertheless. I wrote a separate report about the meeting: https://tanukaskinen.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/pipewire-hackfest-2018-in-edinburgh/
This post was originally written on 2018-11-05, and first made available to my Patreon supporters. Speaking of Patreon – I’m using crowdfunding in an attempt to make it financially sustainable to continue my volunteer work as a PulseAudio maintainer. If you’d like to help, check out my Patreon page (or Liberapay).
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