Just when I said that I was resuming my work as a PulseAudio maintainer in Gentoo, Lennart released a 0.9.16-test1 tarball. This was my cue to enter the scene upstream: the first test at packaging this in Gentoo failed, for a series of different reasons, some of which are internal (we don’t have the latest version of udev available yet, I hope we will by the time PulseAudio 0.9.16 final is releasd), but most are due to upstream changes that didn’t take into consideration some corner cases that Gentoo, as usual, gets to deal with.
So you won’t see the test1 (rc1) ebuild in the tree at all, you’ll probably have to wait for test2, and even that will require some work. For now I’ve fixed all the build- and run-time issues I’ve seen in the released tarball and git repository; plus I’ve been able to get it to properly build fully on both (Gentoo/)FreeBSD and OpenSolaris (with Prefix). I haven’t been able to experiment with actually having it playing yet, but it’ll come there at one point.
Unfortunately there are still a few shady details that I or someone else has to take care of. For instance, the tests still fail consistently: last time I tried them I got two failures on Yamato, one related to IPv6 enabled in PulseAudio build, but not enabled for the kernel, resulting in the IP ACL test asseting out (now I’ve fixed it, by warning of the case, and ignoring it as a failure); the other is the mixing test, which fails for everybody because it doesn’t know anything about the 24-bit and 24-bit-in-32-bit sample types; this I extended to support 24-bit, but was unable to do anything about the 24-bit-in-32-bit because I couldn’t grok it properly.
On non-Linux operating systems (FreeBSD and OpenSolaris), I had to work on a few more issues, like implicit declarations (there still is one in OpenSolaris), shadowed names, and of course there is some slight porting to be done, which I have nowhere near finished yet: the shm (Shared Memory) support in FreeBSD is imperfect, and for neither operating systems I’ve implemented the “get process name” function.
Okay I’m not able to provide a 100% porting to all the operating systems out there, but I still think I can do a bit to help out by making sure that PulseAudio won’t need to be extensively patched by all the porters out there. And until Lennart actually gets around merging my patches, you can find all them at gitorious so you can test them.
Update (2017-04-22): as you may know, Gitorious was acquired by GitLab in 2015 and turned down the service. This means you can’t access those patches anymore.