On Fri, 28 Sep 2007, Nils wrote:

> As I see it there are several reasons for the low activity from developers
> with regard to your patches (or any other voice related patches) aside from
> the usual limited free time problem :)
>
> 1) Few of the more active developers use the voice ui. This is probably the
> major factor, as you stated it is not very interesting to work on stuff you
> don't use yourself.
>
> 2) No one really knows the code, none of the active committers have worked
> very much with the voice ui code and in the MAINTAINERS document that was
> introduced a while ago this becomes apparent, there's no maintainer for
> voice. This means that it is a lot more work for someone to review a patch
> for this code.

Well I might like to help with that, given the chance. The high-level
voice UI code is really not terribly complicated, and I'm becoming fairly
familiar with it.

> 3) The voice ui is buggy, there are a few annoying bugs around that cause
> crashes, hangs and other glitches

Still, that's better than it was IMO.

> as well as some fundamental issues like
> the no-voice-on-pause issue.

Definitely.

> 4) This is a bit related to 3) the voice ui ties in with the dreaded swcodec
> playback code which no one understands fully either and is full of hacks and
> buggy too, so any changes in or in relation to this can cause problems that
> are hard to predict and debug.

Indeed. But I have mostly stayed away from that so far. It shouldn't be an
issue in reviewing my patches.

> 5) Because of the difference in playback code between swcodec and hwcodec
> players a lot of testing of changes in this area are needed, as the older
> hwcodec players are becoming more uncommon among our users this can be quite
> difficult.

This one is the aspect I am not too sure how to handle. It suggests an
interesting question however: among the remaining hwcodec users, is there
anyone at all using voice?

> Personally I feel that improvements to this unique feature are very welcome
> but I often do not feel qualified to review those patches.

Thank you for your encouragemens.

-- 
Stéphane Doyon
<s.doyon_at_videotron.ca>
http://pages.videotron.com/sdoyon/