Against to avoid the problem of bus factor, I’m going to write down here what the plans are, for what concerns me, with PulseAudio and Gentoo for this end of Summer 2009, mostly related to what will happen when I’ll come back from my vacations in London, after mid August.
This actually is also out of candrews asking for it as I haven’t really thought about writing this before that.
So the first thing to say is that I am following PulseAudio pretty well; or rather I’m following Lennart pretty well (he’s also the one that suggested me to rewrite udev’s build system to use non-recursive automake — something I’ll write more about another day), so I’m not sleeping waiting.
Indeed, the 0.9.16 test releases are available in Gentoo already, although masked, and since recently they both support udev hotplug (preferring it over HAL), and also pass all the checks already. A note on the tests is needed though: the mix-test lacks a few entries, in particular regarding 24-in-32-bit samples, and is for this reason disabled in the current ebuild (Lennart should be working on it); at the same time, the ebuild is running test specifically in the source directory, because the intltool checks fail; badly. In theory the problem should be fixed in 0.41 series of intltool, but I am unsure whether that should be packaged or not by us.
In the next release, whether it’ll be another test release or the final release, there will also be a few differences in the handling of audio APIs. The OSS support will be restricted, masking the USE flag on Linux (leaving it enabled for FreeBSD obviously); this means that users wanting to use stuff like OSS4, which is not in Portage and if it’s for me will never be, will have to go a slightly longer way to get it to work with PulseAudio. The reason for this is that Lennart really don’t want to support that, and I can agree with him. Now, if you know the package well, you’ll probably be wondering “what about the OSS-compatibility wrapper?” this is solved already: in GIT the OSS output and wrapper supports are split in two different options, the former will be tied to the oss USE flag, the latter will be left in “auto-mode”, which will create the padsp rapper on all Gentoo Linux and FreeBSD systems. And this should fix your problem Luca!
As for some of the new features, like for instance Rygel UPnP support, well, I’ll probably be working on the sometime in the future; I do want to get Rygel in portage, especially if that will allow me to look at my vacation’s photos directly on my Sony Bravia networked TV.