Last monthly report: November 2020

Yes, this is really my last monthly report. More about that at the end of the post.

PulseAudio 14.0 is finally out! You can find out what’s new from the release notes. My work in November was mostly about preparing the release. The release notes are mostly written by me. I also fixed a recent regression in handling headphone unplug events, documented the “description” and “description-key” options in the ALSA mapping configuration, and disabled the experimental GStreamer-based RTP implementation by default in the Autotools build system.

Last month’s reviews:

• Arun Raghavan fixed a regression caused by the new “availability group” feature. Output wasn’t any more automatically switched to a newly plugged in headset, if the hardware didn’t know the type of the device (headset, headphones or microphone).
• Arun also changed the availability group logic so that if a port would be the only member of a group (which is the usual case), the group is deleted and the port is not added to any availability group. This should make life easier for applications handling the availability groups and the pactl list output less confusing.
• Igor Kovalenko changed the pactl list output so that it explicitly says when a port’s availability is unknown (previously the availability was mentioned only if it was known).
• Igor also added more debug logging in the code that decides whether to automatically switch to a port when its availability changes.
• Igor also made a fix for the same regression that I mentioned in the first paragraph. When I reviewed Igor’s patch, I decided to fix the bug in a different way.
• Pali Rohár fixed some compiler warnings in the ALSA code.
• Arun Raghavan reverted a public API change that was introduced in PulseAudio 13.0. The change was not meant to affect applications, but it did, so we chose to revert it. Reverting the change might again break some applications, but probably reverting will cause less problems than keeping the change.

So, I have decided to end the crowdfunding of my work on Patreon and Liberapay. My financial situation has improved, and I don’t want to ask for donations when it’s unnecessary. I will continue my PulseAudio work as before, but I have stopped maintaining recipes in OpenEmbedded (I don’t use OpenEmbedded myself anymore, so I was not very motivated to do that work). Big thank you to everyone who has supported me on Patreon and Liberapay during the last four years!