Better Bluetooth A2DP support on Linux

[Pali Rohár]

Hello!

On Saturday 13 June 2020 17:36:14 Felipe Sateler wrote:
> Hello Pali,
> 
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 3:17 PM Pali Rohár <pali.rohar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hello!
> >
> > For two years I have been playing with Bluetooth audio support. I
> > prepared patches for pulseaudio which radically improve bluetooth A2DP
> > situation on Linux, but now after two years I see that pulseaudio
> > maintainers are in interested in them and they are fine with current
> > bluetooth audio state on Linux.
> >
> > For last two months lot of users are asking me when my patches would be
> > merged into pulseaudio and when bluetooth audio situation on Linux would
> > be better.
> >
> > To all users now I'm writing reply, that they should forgot about Linux
> > support as maintainers are not interested in it and users should use e.g.
> > Apple systems where everything bluetooth audio related is working out of
> > the box. It is just wasting time for non-power users on Linux to try to
> > do anything if there are already Apple and Windows systems where it is
> > working.
> >
> > So, I would like to ask you, Debian maintainers, are you interested in
> > Bluetooth A2DP patches for pulseaudio in which pulseaudio maintainers
> > are not interested? I have working support for aptX, aptX-HD, SBC-XQ
> > and FastStream codecs in A2DP profile. FastStream is also with
> > microphone support.
> >
> 
> I don't want to maintain a fork of pulseaudio. So including patches that
> upstream *actively* doesn't want is a hard sell.

I understand your points. If you are asking how to sell it, is not poor
audio support on Linux good argument compared to Windows and Apple
support?

Because as I wrote, really it is better to not use Linux/Debian for
bluetooth audio and rather switch to Windows or Apple system.

> However, I don't actually see that upstream is actively opposed. I even see
> some activity happening right now which is awesome!

No, upstream is really not interested in it. I thought that something is
happening but I was wrong.

I'm stopping communication with upstream. It is just takes time and has
no result. After 2 years basically nothing happened. Seems they do not
want to touch anything bluetooth related and they like current state.
Looks like that they also lost other developers as I do not see any
activity on bluetooth part.

> I would very much consider including patches that are on track to being
> upstreamed, provided you are willing to help with rebasing patches on new
> upstream versions. To be completely honest, my debian time is fairly
> limited, so I'm not committing to more work now.
> 
> I would also be willing to consider following a patched-pulseaudio
> upstream, especially of other distros are including the same patches. But
> the important thing is that I am not an active pulseaudio developer, and
> thus I don't want to maintain patches. I want to follow some upstream, not
> be one.

So, what about contacting other Linux distributions and maintaining
patches collectively? I'm sure that users of other Linux distributions
are interested in improved bluetooth audio support based on feedbacks
which I got in private emails.

Let me know what do you think.

-- 
Pali Rohár
pali.rohar at gmail.com