Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Colin Walters <walters redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 19:09 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> I want polypaudio to become the default sound server of Gnome. Is this
> so difficult to understand?

If by "default sound server of GNOME" you mean "recommended for use when
the underlying OS does not support sound mixing or networked audio (if
desired)", then I understand.   

> While gedit is the the *default* editor of Gnome, I don't use it, I
> use Emacs. But I am OK with the decision to make gedit the default
> editor. And that is exactly what I request for polypaudio: don't
> depend on it, but suggest and use it as *default*. 

Let's be precise - the important distinction between gedit versus Emacs
isn't "defaultness"; it is which of them is included in the GNOME
distribution, in particular the Platform or Desktop.  See:

http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/tasks.html

So if you are arguing that Polypaudio should be included in the Platform
or Desktop modules, then I disagree with that.  It can be recommended
for use, but it should not be required.  Put another way, applications
in the GNOME Desktop can *not* depend on it explicitly.

If you are instead arguing that the default value of the GStreamer GConf
sink should be "polypaudiosink" instead of "osssink" or "alsasink" on
Linux, then I don't particularly care.

> That's not the way it works. Debian doesn't decide on having a
> default sound server. They take what Gnome provides them with. It's
> Gnome's decision to make one the default.

No, wrong.  This issue ties into much more than GNOME, because there are
many more audio applications than just the ones GNOME ships.  There are
commandline tools like ogg123, 3rd-party applications like Gaim,
Audacity, Helix Player, etc.  GNOME can't dictate sound API to those
applications.  Instead, it has to be up to the OS distributor.

Speaking for Fedora, we will make a decision on this, hopefully for FC4,
and we will implement it across the entire OS so that sound mixing works
*everywhere*, not just in GNOME.

If Debian can't come to a decision on a sound system, that's a Debian
issue.