Re: GNOME 2.26 module inclusion discussion heats up

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2009-01-19 at 14:33 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le lundi 19 janvier 2009 à 11:21 +0100, Rodrigo Moya a écrit :
> > you're right about the resources taken by the hidden applet, but as you
> > see, Debian, openSUSE and Mandriva need ways to offer users a fallback,
> > so we really need it. If there's a better solution than hiding the
> > applet, let's use that, but can't think of a better (and quicker) way
> > right now
> 
> Yes, there’s a quicker way: restore the full GStreamer-based panel
> applet. Contrarily to gnome-volume-control, there’s not much gain in
> using PA in the applet.

There is.

We can detect when applications are recording, providing a quick way to
change the recording level.

We automatically provide a volume for the default output, which can be
switched on-the-fly (you can't do that at all with ALSA).

We remove tons of obscure preferences, like which channel the control
should change.

We remove a lot of maintenance problems where either the applications or
GStreamer contains work-arounds for each of the backends' bugs, and move
those problems into PulseAudio and (mostly) ALSA. It also means a lot of
the code is shared between volume applications (the main volume-control
app, the "applet", and the gnome-settings-daemon media keys plugin).

We now have a per-app volume which can be advertised outside the
application itself (although right now it means that applications need
to use playbin2 if they use GStreamer, ALSA applications will just
work).