The Great Pulseaudio Mixer Debate: a modest (productive) proposal

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2009-04-25 at 03:34 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 24.04.09 23:48, David Woodhouse (dwmw2 at infradead.org) wrote:
> 
> > I don't think we're just going to decide that Fedora doesn't care about
> > these users -- and from what I saw today I don't think it's likely that
> > the PA folks will decide that they _do_ care.
> > 
> > So it looks like if we keep PulseAudio as the core around which Fedora
> > audio support is based, we're _always_ going to need to keep something
> > extra to fill the functionality gap.
> 
> Oh great. This sounds like an invitation to stop working on cleaning
> up the volume control situation entirely. If we never can get rid of
> the old cruft and need to prominently feature it in all future release
> then why even try?

I believe that our user interface people are good enough that they can
find some middle ground -- somewhere a long way from the oft-cited
alsa-mixer-of-doom, and much closer to the nice but oversimplified F-11
implementation of gnome-volume-control -- but which actually lets people
have better control over their hardware _when_ they need it.

I don't believe that we're really limited to one extreme or the other.

So no, I don't believe that it's an invitation to stop working on it at
all. It's merely an invitation to do better.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation

Hell, I suck at UI design and even _I_ can make a UI simpler just by
ripping functionality out of it. Surely we have people who are better
than that?