FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 15:08 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:

> > Sorry, but I think you're picking entirely the wrong case to try and
> > make your point. Try as hard as I can, I can't see how it would be
> > better to have the Brave New World mixer and a wiki page instructing
> > people on how to use alsamixer than it is to have the Brave New World
> > mixer and a second mixer application available in the menus. The total
> > cost to the design of the desktop is: one additional menu entry. I'm
> > really having a hard time seeing how this is a terrible design decision.
> 
> Look, calling our design the "Brave New World mixer" doesn't
> particularly make you come across as someone we should be listening
> to.

Sorry, that's not how I meant it. I like
referring to things with silly names (cf. Great Mixer Debate). It
doesn't *mean* anything. If you want to know what I think, read what I
say, and I've already said I like the new mixer design. I like
PulseAudio, I like what Lennart's doing to revise audio support, I've
been running the damn thing since it was called PolypAudio and I've been
doing user support trying to improve it for years. At this very moment I
am busy working on the tracker bug I filed with Lennart's help to try
and track down as many volume bugs as possible, which is one of the
things that needs to happen for the new mixer to be sufficient on its
own.

The typical problem of PulseAudio detractors is that they refuse to see
any value in PulseAudio and advocate disabling it at the first possible
opportunity, to everyone, for completely unrelated issues.

On the *other* side, the typical problem of some in PulseAudio / GNOME
is that they see enemies everywhere. I'm not an enemy. I'm not one of
the people who's just here to bash Pulse at every possible opportunity.
I'm trying to *help*, by removing what will otherwise become yet another
"PulseAudio sucks!" issue in Fedora 11. Do you really want that? Do you
*want* to release a Fedora 11 which gives more ammunition to the people
who just say that anything we try to do to improve the audio
infrastructure is broken? Can't we please just spike their guns so we
can get something fricking productive done?

>   And frankly, if you can't see why it is dumb to have two entries
> in the menu for controlling your sound and volume then well maybe we
> shouldn't be listening to you.  

Please instead of making personal attacks on me, explain. I *know* it's
not perfect UI, but perfect UI is not an almighty goal in and of itself,
it is a part of a product, and the goal of the product is to make people
happy by letting them do what they need to do. A 'good' UI which does
not let the user do what they need to do with it is no use. A 'bad' UI
which does is better. It's not perfect, but it's better.

> Also, seems like a bad decision to
> want to QA two entirely separate code paths for doing essentially the
> same thing.

I never said it was perfect, I said it was an improvement on the current
situation. That does not require it not to have drawbacks.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net