Notes from Sound BoF at GUADEC 2008

[Lennart Poettering <lennart poettering net>]

Heya!

At GUADEC 2008 in Istanbul we had a little improvised Desktop Sound BoF. Here
are my notes:

Present:

- Marc Andre Lureau
- Jens Granseuer 
- Bastien Nocera
- Vincent Untz
- Lennart Poettering
- William Jon McCan
(Did I forget anyone?)

Action plan:

       Bastien: 
           1. write a new gnome-volume-control, directly linking against
              libpulse, that does all what pavucontrol does, however
              doesn't suck, isn't written in C++ and looks as pretty as
              the current g-v-c. (a compact version should be
              embeddable into the panel, a full version should run
              standalone. Also see Topaz mockups)
           2. While doing that he will send Lennart his API criticisms,
              who then needs to fix them.
           3. Moves the Fedora Feature page to l.g.o

       Vincent:
           1. Check with people (i.e. Solaris, ...) if it is OK to
              link against libpulse directly from some very specific 
              desktop applications (such as g-v-c) instead of always 
              going through some kind of abstraction layer (i.e. 
              GStreamer, libcanberra, ...).
           2. Ask KDE folks about how to proceed with PA and lib
              canberra 
        
        Jens:
           1. Write new sound theme config dialog page

        Lennart:
           1. Release pa 0.9.11, so that Bastien can actually make use
              of the property support of PA (i.e. icons for audio apps
              in volcontrol)
           2. Change PA to not save/restore volumes per app, but per
              role of apps (i.e. "voip" vs. "music" vs. "movie"...). 
           3. Allow passing of role to gst-pulse.
           4. Propose libcanberra for 2.24

        Marc-Andre:
           1. Post his flat volumes patch for PA.

Also, we hoped that we can convince Rodrigo to write the other sound
config dialog page, which would allow configuration of the default
devices for special roles. Before this can be started, Lennart needs
to do his items on the list first, however.

This stuff is intended for 2.26 (though the volcontrol should end up
in F10 already). I'll propose libcanberra for 2.24 already, however,
so that people can start making use of sound events in GNOME in more
places.
        
The relevant bug numbers for the patches I already posted
are: 541420, 539786, 539840, 539790, 368304.

Questions? Anything I forgot?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4