Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[David Woodhouse]

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 18:58 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> > I know you mean well by trying to simplify this entire mess (I hated the
> > old Volume Control, it was too much), but on the other hand this seems
> > to be a messy problem and taking too much control from the user is a
> > mistake. At least that's what my intuition is telling me, FWIW.
> 
> If we don' try to fix it then this will never be fixed.

I agree -- it is a wonderful thing that we're trying to fix this, and I
applaud your efforts.

But we have to acknowledge that we cannot always get it 100% right, and
that we _do_ need to let the user have ultimate control.

Even ignoring the 'esoteric' use cases, I don't think we're ever going
to see an end to bugs like #493790 or the last part of #497698.
It's all very well saying that the ALSA hardware database should know
everything -- but it _doesn't_, and realistically speaking it never
will.

It doesn't even know about the 'Front' control on my MacBook Pro -- so
if I didn't have gnome-alsamixer, the F-11 installation would just be
inexplicably quieter than F-10 was.

You can argue that that's a bug in the database, and even that it's
someone _else's_ database so it's not your problem. And you'd be right,
to a certain extent.

But you seem to be missing the point that there will _always_ be bugs in
the database, and it's _your_ code which has suddenly promoted that
database from being a 'convenience' to a 'mission critical' thing, by
relying on it 100% and giving the user no override.

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