[Jack-Devel] stepping down

[Patrick Shirkey]

On Sun, January 31, 2016 3:13 am, Paul Davis wrote:
> Sometime in the next two weeks, I will find the time to deal with a
> variety
> of pull requests for JACK 1, update some articles on jackaudio.org
> (notably
> FAQ stuff), and do a new release of JACK 1.
>
> This will be my last work on JACK. The time has come for me to step down
> from my role as "benign dictator (and jack1 maintainer)". There several
> reasons for this:
>
>   * most linux distributions use JACK2 as their default, so JACK1's
> relevance has diminished. I
>     still believe JACK1 to be a superior choice from some technical
> perspectives, but there is
>     no doubt that JACK2's integration with dbus and thus its
> interoperability with PulseAudio
>     has made this the safe and simpler choice for Linux.
>
>  * I really don't have the time to even think about things related to JACK
> these days. It does
>    any future development a disservice to have me as the bottleneck, which
> I effectively am
>    at the moment.
>
>  * Because 110% of my time is spent on Ardour, the fact that Ardour now
> has
> non-JACK
>    audio/MIDI I/O options has diminished the significance of JACK for my
> own work.
>
>  * as the years have gone on, although I am still delighted by the
> technical quality and
>    the conception of JACK, I no longer think that it is a particularly
> good
> idea for most users. There
>    are times when it is useful
>
> I will continue to pay for the hosting of jackaudio.org (even though JACK2
> continues to be distributed, managed and communicated about via other
> channels), although if someone wanted to migrate this to some other more
> communitarian platform, we could look into that.
>
> I would be happy if someone volunteered to step up as maintainer of JACK1.
> It would obviously be even better if someone was willing to take the big
> leap to JACK3, a version that combines all the best parts of JACK1 and
> JACK2, but I think it is more realistic to accept at this point that this
> is not going to happen.
>
> If nobody does step up, then there is a good chance that JACK1 will become
> officially unmaintained. This isn't of much consequence, because once the
> latest pull requests are merged, there won't be any known bugs in the
> code,
> and also because not many people use it anymore. This also means, of
> course, that "maintainer" is not much of a task, should someone feel
> hesitant about taking it on.
>

The end of an era!

A big congratulations to Paul and the Ardour team for getting to the point
where Paul is too busy to work on JACK anymore. That is a great
accomplishment and is due in large part to the original development of
JACK to create a solid foundation for Ardour.

JACK1 is still a very useful part of our toolkit. We routinely use it for
distributed audio processing on a range of machines with many different
versions of Linux. In that environment it seems to be more stable than
JACK2.

It seems that the differences between JACK1 and JACK2 relate to the
intended target use case. JACK2 does a decent job of trying to enable many
consumer friendly tasks and take out some of the pain of doing inter
application audio production. JACK1 handles some heavy lifting scenarios
more effectively than JACK2.

Maybe that is a good direction to continue for the different codebases?

JACK1 - Heavy lift mechanism for high performance Linux platforms
JACK2 - Flexible user friendly solution with cross platform support

I don't see any problem with continuing the split development process in
that regard. Maybe we don't need a single tool to do everything anyway?

I hope that Paul will continue to provide his insight and expertise as
part of the JACK development community.

If he is interested, I nominate Harry Van Haaren as the new official
maintainer for JACK1 codebase. He has proven his skills and commitment and
is a fair and impartial communicator.

Anyone else want to put their hat in?




--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd