FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2009-05-02 at 11:34 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> We wrote use cases, we checked what other systems did, and we intend
> to
> present something to the user that's less complicated than showing up
> all the knobs PulseAudio offers.

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. These are features that Lennart and
others have gone on the public record as saying are intended to be in
g-v-c and will be in g-v-c in future. So obviously you consider those
important use cases that we ought to be supporting.

However, you say it's perfectly fine to ship - as our only installed
graphical mixer in F11 - a mixer which *doesn't* yet have those
features.

I mean...come on! You can't just go about introducing huge functional
regressions willy-nilly because you want to have the new design in as
soon as you've finished a working prototype with half the features
missing! This isn't PulseAudio itself, where we really needed to ship
the thing before it was really done to get useful wide-based testing; in
this case we already *know* what g-v-c is missing, and those features
can be worked on without causing people the pain of suddenly losing
these features.

Frankly I'm becoming more and more in favour of advocating simply having
gnome-media build the old mixer for F11 and delay the new one entirely
until F12 (or, hell, it could go into F11 as an update if profile
switching and input switching get implemented). That's simpler (it just
requires flipping a switch in the gnome-media spec), less invasive,
satisfies the "we should only have one mixer" requirement, and is more
in line with what people apparently think the role of FESco should be
(approving or denying new features, not mandating interface
compromises).

I liked the compromise because at least we have the new mixer in there
for people to try out, and it'd help us find the
bad-default-volume-settings-from-ALSA bugs, but maybe this way would get
less resistance from both sides...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net