FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Bastien Nocera]

On Sat, 2009-05-02 at 18:59 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-05-03 at 01:59 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 
> > > Here's the other thing that gets me about this: okay, so you thought
> > > about the use cases you want to support and came up with a design.
> > > Great.
> > > 
> > > But we don't even have that design yet. That design includes input
> > > switching and profile switching.
> > 
> > Tell me where I wrote that:
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VolumeControl#User_Experience
> > 
> > <snip rant>
> > 
> > *Where*
> > 
> > I already asked this question when Will made the same assumption as you
> > did, during the Fesco meeting. The use cases we had didn't include any
> > need for profile switching.
> 
> That just makes me question even more your competence to be doing the
> design; if you manage to come up with a design for a mixer application
> without considering the importance of digital output, well. Er.
> That's...um. My output device is connected digitally. So are zillions of
> others. That's why soundcards ship with S/PDIF outputs. Even cheap
> crappy onboard sound, where the manufacturers would gladly save a cent
> any old way, universally include S/PDIF now - because people want it.
> How were you expecting us to hear any sound?
> 
> I suspect this whole process was managed by people who are great at
> interface design, and great at the software side of audio/video (which I
> know you are), but perhaps didn't think hard enough about what people
> actually do with audio hardware.

I call BS here. PulseAudio never supported SPDIF outputs properly
before. So we really haven't made the experience any worse.

<snip>
> > A couple of benefits from the current volume control compared to the old
> > one:
> > - "default" input and output control
> > - microphone level checks
> > - sound effects level control
> > - per-application volume control (for apps that support it)
> 
> Yes, these are neat. Especially default input device control. And that's
> more support for the "ship two mixers" compromise (which, ironically, it
> turns out is exactly what we've been doing for three releases). These
> are great features of PulseAudio (supplied up till now by pavucontrol).
> I like them. I've written blog entries extolling their virtues. I've
> cited them in long argumentative threads about how PA is shit. But they
> don't excuse you from covering really basic audio use cases like
> *digital frickin' output*.



> > The only use case(s) that we haven't catered for are for people who want
> > to record things, and the sound card has more than 1 input. 
> 
> No, not correct at all. You haven't yet catered for people who want to
> *monitor* (rather than record) an input channel

What on earth is "monitoring" an input? There's a volume level in
gnome-volume-control, we didn't have that before. I stand by the
statement I made above. If I didn't understand the problem properly,
feel free to hop onto the fedora-desktop list and explain what's missing
from:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VolumeControlContinued

> , people who have digital
> outputs, or people who have analog surround sound setups (the Logitech
> Z-5300 has been in production for about seven years for a *reason* -
> people buy this stuff).

Analog surround will be supported by the next version of
gnome-volume-control. You had to poke in ALSA to get this working
before, now you can use pavucontrol, or a one-liner in pacmd to fix
that.

Not a regression then.

> > Yes, it's a
> > big omission, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to write off the
> > benefits we're bringing for a large number of users already.
> 
> I'm not. As I said, I like those things. Which I was I was on the side
> which was supporting the compromise by which we would have those
> features AND the features g-v-c is missing. It's not frickin' rocket
> science!

Seriously. The discussion started because there were regressions, then
you go on accusing us of missing features that were never properly
supported in the first place.

SPDIF and analog surround weren't supported by the crappy mixers we had
before, and they're not supported now. But now we have the framework to
make those work. I see that as a great step forward.