FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 15:48 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Of course, I don't know that the proposed solution does this, since,
> a week after it was proposed, a week after we've cut our last milestone
> release, and less than two weeks before we cut the hopefully-to-be-shipped
> release candidate, this proposed solution *has yet to land in any form
> at all*. Given the stage of the schedule now, I find it pretty preposterous
> that we're still considering changing things.

So, to try and carry on being productive, here's the current status and
what needs to happen here. If people could *please* contribute to this
process that would be greatly appreciated.

There are two open review requests, one for gnome-alsamixer, one for
gst-mixer.

gnome-alsamixer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=497593
gst-mixer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498136

we need to pick one and move ahead with it. The review needs to be done
and the package accepted into rawhide, then the change to add it to the
default spin can be done.

I did a quick review of both tools with Bill. Here's our conclusions.

gst-mixer - the old gnome-volume-control - has a rather better UI, but a
somewhat odd work flow. To select an input device you have to hit
Preferences and enable a bunch of controls "Line-in Capture", "CD
Capture", "Microphone Capture" etc. (It may that these are displayed by
default on some cards but this didn't work for me and Bill, I don't
really know). Then you can go to the Switches tab and select your input,
except for me the input selection switches act as checkboxes not radio
buttons (they should act as radio buttons and only let one be selected
at a time), so I can have Video Capture, Microphone Capture, CD Capture
and Line-in Capture selected all at once, but the one I clicked on last
is the one that's actually active.

So it's an odd interface and seems buggy for me and Bill, but it does
what you need in the end. I don't know if either of these things are
expected behaviour, Bastien might.

gnome-alsamixer - it's a butt-ugly UI. But then, it's just the same as
alsamixer and most other traditional mixers, it just shows you all the
channels and a bunch of checkboxes. It does some silly stuff like the
gradients on the sliders are the wrong way round, but that's not really
important. Fundamentally it works how most mixers classically do, and it
works properly for me: all my inputs have a "Rec." checkbox, and
checking the appropriate one selects that as the input channel, and they
act as radio buttons (even though they're displayed as checkboxes).

So, them's the choices. I don't really care which is picked, I'll
maintain either if wanted or hand off to someone else. Just according to
the FESco decision one needs to be picked and added ASAP.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net