2008/12/12 P.B. pb@fsfe.org:
simo wrote:
IT just shows that the audio subsystem is not mature, and no one of the so far proposed and built one was good enoguh to make everybody just switch to it.
I think with Alsa, Jack & pulseaudio things should be fine. As far as I know, both pulseaudio and jack rely on alsa underneith, so there's no competition there. Jack is for low-latency and pulse is, let's say, for the desktop. Jack and Pulse and rather young, and there's a lot happening in those corners.
Sound on Linux has been a complete mess as far back as I can remember. Every new solution claims to solve all the problems of the previous solutions and provide backward compatibility, and fails on both.
e.g. at present sound in Wine on Ubuntu is a PITA, because PulseAudio's ALSA support is lacking and no-one's coming forward to write an entire new PulseAudio backend for Wine itself. The obvious answer is to fix the ALSA support in Pulse, but this appears to be a Simple Matter Of Programming, i.e. not that easy. Result: no sound in Wine unless you disable Pulse and use ALSA instead, i.e. an imposition on the end-user that should surely be fixed if at all possible.
- database, apache and shell:
If you're only dealing with English, you're lucky. There are several different environment variables in the right scopes to be set properly in order to get special characters working properly across such a system. Even if you use UTF8. I've done it and I know I'll have to search the web for it if I have to do it again, because even if you've been through this, it's tough to remember.
Yes, internationalisation is a mess. Too many apps get US-ASCII working and everything else is an afterthought, even if the app is UTF-8 clean.
Files with umlauts can't be copied. One might think that if you're using UTF8 it's fine, but it's not. I know how to fix it, but I'd say it's a no-go for a computer novice.
This one's a very real problem for me too. It's silly to presume a homogenous ext3-supporting environment.
That's what I currently explain to them. Using some examples from the "real world" often helps, but I'd like some of the issues I've mentioned to be "reminders from the past", and not something which is here to stay. Things are already getting better.
Acknowledging broken things are broken is a first step. "Sorry, we know it sucks, we're working hard on it."
- d.