While PulseAudio can work through ALSA, it makes you lose the finer grains of control over audio when it is sent through ALSA to PulseAudio. It is also redundant in most cases, since PulseAudio generally will be connected to localhost to ALSA on localhost, so it is not very smart to rely on winealsa to connect to PulseAudio. the wineesd component could be replaced with a winepulse component (just made up the name, winepulse) that would support the finer grains of control in the audio server. Stuff like the application based mixer could be handled through winepulse and allow Wine to control only its own audio stream. That way, there isn't a conflict between audio streams to send to audio output. Sending audio output through ALSA/OSS to any audio server is basically redundant and pointless. Sending to the Audio Server to ALSA/OSS is better.
On 10/9/07, Jan Zerebecki <jan.wine@zerebecki.de> wrote:
I agree that wineoss needs to remain.
I don't remember anymore if there was still some reason for
keeping wineesd.
Both jack and pulseaudio can provide alsa support for
applications. So in principle there is no reason for direct
support in wine for either of them.
We might be able to get trough with also removing winejack and
winenas. winejack could be replaced with either wineasio (which
uses jack directly) or with winealsa -> jacks alsa plugin. The
main use case for winenas is network audio in a thin client
environment which I assume is also supported by pulseaudio where
we again can use winealsa -> pulseaudios alsa plugin.
Jan