Comment 523 for bug 371897

(In reply to Ben Shadwick from comment #403)
> The Wine devs are so irrationally close-minded about this issue

OK, stop there before this descends into a flame-war.

> citing of silly procedural issues as an excuse to avoid having
> to incorporate fixes.

Those "procedural issues" relate to code quality and cooperative functionality with other modules. Winepulse is not up to scratch.

> It's always sad and frustrating to see open source projects be so
> insensitive to the concerns of end-users, but when people go so far as to
> contribute actual code changes and still be rejected out of hand, there's
> just nothing to be done.

I've been out of the loop for a while, but last time I was actively commenting on this bug Wine devs were planning an architectural change in the way audio drivers work. Even before that, they were hesitant to include ANY new audio drivers because the existing framework employs a lot of code duplication.

> Situations like this are what cause a lot of projects to fork, which is the
> worst way for things to work themselves out because it causes the community
> to split their efforts.

The only people to have successfully forked Wine are Codeweavers (Crossover Office et al) and that's only because they work closely with Wine devs. It's a huge project. Every bugfix is like a pharmaceutical drug: it may fix a problem, but will almost certainly have unforseen side-effects.

One of my major objections to the existing Winepulse code is that it seems to completely ignore MIDI support. Even without the other hurdles to inclusion, an audio driver simply would not be considered if it will completely break applications that ask for MIDI.