Re: (Partial) GNOME 3 status update

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 01:32 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mercredi 15 juillet 2009 à 12:00 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki a écrit :
> > On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Brian Cameron<Brian Cameron sun com> wrote:
> > > Solaris continues to use gst-mixer since Solaris does not yet provide
> > > PulseAudio.  PulseAudio doesn't provide as much value on Solaris since
> > > OSSv4 provides mixing functionalities directly in the OSS layer.
> > 
> > Would introducing PA have any downsides? Having a common abstraction
> > layer for sound would likely make it easier to develop portable apps.
> 
> Forcing PA breaks all pass-through setups, which are becoming less
> uncommon with HDMI spreading. And that’s not specific to Solaris.

There's pasuspender for now, and there's already plans to fix this[1].
In all cases, pass-thru setups are too hard to setup on Linux, so it's
not like the extra fiddling will hurt anyone (for now anyway).

In the future, I don't see how we could have reasonable support for the
use cases we want to handle (say, move one stream from internal
speakers/soundcard to USB speakers) without having something like PA
available. Using only ALSA (or a sound system with similar capabilities
such as OSSv4) is a dead-end.

[1]:
https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-January/002897.html
for example