audio code maintainers, A call to arms

[Yuriy Tsibizov]

> > The there is MIDI...
> >

>         First, I guess I owe an apology to the list and to freebsd in
> general for dragging my feet on MIDI.  The stunning silence is
> incredibly demotivating to me.  Over the many months think I've had one
> positive response to my work (it works!) and one negative (does not
> compile for non-i386, printf qualifiers).
[...]
>         But MIDI isn't FreeBSD problem.  We've been stagnant in sound
> infrastructure, both in the human and software sense.  Other projects
> have continued along without us.  We don't have anybody that really
> understands the sound infrastructure, esp given that locking was an
> after thought that makes things infinitely more complex.
>         To me, the worse aspect is that new people are scared off
> either by the perceived complexity issues or general unwillingness of
> the powers that be to accept a new direction.

>         To move forward we need to:
> - Get a new sound team.  I don't know how to go about this, maybe a
>   general call to arms, or an appointment from core or maybe a
>   guillotine backed revolution.
> - Set a list of priorities and start working on them.  I see the major
>   TODO items:

>   - Review this list
>   - Figure out which PR are still applicable, close the rest.

As I can remember, there also a lot of PRs that was not assigned to
sound@, at least for emu10k1 driver (I was looking on them in 2003 when
Orion started building NEWPCMv2 team). I can look at open PRs when I get
GNATS database on my home computer (next weekend, I think).

>   - Move forward with features, other projects have far surpassed us.
>     To me the most glaring difference is that we are stuck with a
>     simplistic view of "Mixers" and cannot export the sophisticated
>     controls that present days devices contain.  NetBSD, ALSA, that
>     commercial project have all taken this on.  We could embellish or
>     just plain drop our mixer support while keeping what was good from
>     newpcm2

Another desired feature is multichannel sound. It would be nice to have
possibility to play 7.1/5.1/2.1 sound on cards that support multichannel
output. This, of course, require new mixer infrastructure.


>         So there it is.   How wants to be part of freebsd sound?  Many
> open positions, but the pay sucks.

Not shure. I was trying to understand sound subsystem for almost two years
without good results. I can't keep entire picture of sound internals in my
head :-(.


Yuriy Tsibizov,
http://chibis.persons.gfk.ru/

P.S. Please CC me on reply.