audio code maintainers, A call to arms

[Zane C. Bowers]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 13:09:42 -0500
Mathew Kanner <mat at cnd.mcgill.ca> wrote:

> On Jan 12, Julian Elischer wrote:
> > Firstly, Who is curently maintaining it?
> > Orion Hodson seems to have become scarce.
> > (If you are reading this Orion and I've just missed you, sorry).
> > I saw cg (Cameron Grant) on the lists the other day, but I
> > am not sure who is currently the contact man for sound.
> > let me know if you know :-)
> > If you want the job, speak up :-)
> > The there is MIDI...
> > 
> > Kazuhito HONDA (kazuhito at ph.noda.tus.ac.jp)
> > has been doing some work on the USB audio code
> > and has agreed to act as contact/maintainer for that as
> > it seems to be currently unloved.
> 
> 	Hi Julian,
> 	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).  I never expected to
> be in a vacuum.  Then again, I'm one of those sensitive types.
> 
> 	I'm committed to getting this done, it basically works, but I
> need to be kicked around when I start loosing momentum.
> 
> 
> 	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.
> 
> 	(BTW, Orion gave up his commit bit about a year ago, due to an
> increase in demand on his time, a baby)
> 
> 	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.
>   - 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
>   - Or, just port the NetBSD sound infrastructure.  Sometimes, when
>   I'm
>     depressed, I look into the feasibility of this.
> 
> 
> 	So there it is.   How wants to be part of freebsd sound?  Many
> open positions, but the pay sucks.

	Hi! I would be happy to help. My C is not good enough to help much
with code, but I would be happy to help out in any way I can. If I can
help in any way, please let me know.