Re: Notes from Sound BoF at GUADEC 2008

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 18:50 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> 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

That would be fine, although there's so much code to replace, and taking
into account Pulse's completely (overly?) async API, you'll need to
replace pretty much everything.

> >        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.

I don't know whether they use Phonon for simple event sounds, but they
should probably be told it's overkill, and that they'll need to
reimplement the whole sound spec.
> 
> > 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?

The plan is to make the sound capplet be what it should have been from
the start, and allow to set up policy in PulseAudio from it.

This is approximately what it would look like:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureVolumeControl

Note that those are mockups, and we'll definitely need better widgets
than that.

Making paprefs/paman better isn't really an option, we want the sound
preferences to be able to change sound preferences. Whether the code is
copied from those apps or new when it's merged into the control-center
is unimportant.

Cheers