Re: Notes from Sound BoF at GUADEC 2008

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 01:13 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Heya!
> 
> At GUADEC 2008 in Istanbul we had a little improvised Desktop Sound BoF. Here
> are my notes:

> 
> Action plan:
> 
>        Bastien: 
>            1. write a new gnome-volume-control, directly linking against
>               libpulse, that does all what pavucontrol does, however
>               doesn't suck, isn't written in C++ and looks as pretty as
>               the current g-v-c. (a compact version should be
>               embeddable into the panel, a full version should run
>               standalone. Also see Topaz mockups)
>
I was thinking about just changing the current gnome-volume control and
applet to use pulse/libcanberra directly. I don't think there is need to
write it from scratch, even if we want (yes, we do) to change it as per
the topaz mockups

>        Vincent:
>            1. Check with people (i.e. Solaris, ...) if it is OK to
>               link against libpulse directly from some very specific 
>               desktop applications (such as g-v-c) instead of always 
>               going through some kind of abstraction layer (i.e. 
>               GStreamer, libcanberra, ...).
>            2. Ask KDE folks about how to proceed with PA and lib
>               canberra 
>      
for opensuse 11.1, we are going to use PA for the whole distro, even for
KDE, where (as far as the KDE guys I've talked with say) they will be
using just the gstreamer backend. I don't think they would want to
rewrite/remove phonon code just to accomodate PA/canberra. We can
probably convince them to have a libcanberra-based backend that will,
hopefully, replace their ALSA/GStreamer backends.

>         Lennart:
>            1. Release pa 0.9.11, so that Bastien can actually make use
>               of the property support of PA (i.e. icons for audio apps
>               in volcontrol)
>
when are you going to release? I'm testing 0.9.11 packages now, and it
seems to work pretty good. Anything I should be testing in detail?

> Also, we hoped that we can convince Rodrigo to write the other sound
> config dialog page, which would allow configuration of the default
> devices for special roles. Before this can be started, Lennart needs
> to do his items on the list first, however.
> 
I have allocated time to work on PA for the next few weeks, but I don't
see (or understand) what do we need this for, we already have it in the
sound capplet, or are you talking about something different?

What I would really like to do is to have a better looking paprefs/paman
GUIs, so what are the plans there? Should all that functionality just be
in the gnome-volume-control capplet from Bastien?
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>