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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 23:48 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 15:21 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Second part of the sentence: "which ones are worth supporting in
> > gnome-volume-control". Presumably it's the ones that aren't "worth
> > supporting" that get closed WONTFIX.
> 
> There are two separate categories to consider:
>  "worth supporting in PulseAudio", vs. 
>  "worth supporting in Fedora"
> 
> I think we've established that there are a number of cases in the latter
> category which _don't_ fit into the former. And those are the ones which
> have been closed WONTFIX.
> 
> And it's fine for the PulseAudio folks to say that -- PulseAudio
> deliberately _doesn't_ set out to be all things to all people.
> 
> It's just that the scope of PulseAudio is a little _too_ limited for
> Fedora to stomach.
> 
> So we need a way to restore functionality for those users who fall
> outside the PA scope -- for the moment, shipping gnome-alsamixer (as
> decided by FESCo today) will bridge that gap.
> 
> I'm not sure if we'll find a better solution than that in the future.
> 
> 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.

I was just envisaging making sure we always have a low-level mixer app
available, but not necessarily installed by default. If the Pulse stuff
gets to the point where it covers 95% of cases I personally won't lose
any sleep over having to tell the other 5% to install gnome-alsamixer or
whatever.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net