Thanks for the clarification.
Supporting PulseAudio is something another team could undertake at some
point. However, in order for it to work properly, there are a few things:
1) all the applications would have to be converted to it. (In the Linux
distro world, where all apps are delivered with the distro, and there is
no binary compatibility guarantee, nobody cares. In the Solaris world,
this could create headaches as applications would have to be converted
to understand PulseAudio.)
2) PulseAudio itself would need to be ported to Solaris/Boomer. This
probably isn't a big effort.
3) IIUC, PulseAudio doesn't have a way to express the richness of the
hardware device control that we'd like. (For example, being able to
adjust the level of a particular analog output independently of the
others, or being able to change the function of a jack or configure jack
sense.) I think PulseAudio relies on the underlying subsystem to
provide this -- and for Linux that usually means alsa with its rather
Byzantine configuration files and tools. I don't think that's terribly
workable for Solaris.
-- Garrett
Brian Cameron wrote:
>
> Garrett:
>
>> Its not in the g-v-c code today. But it looks to me like Fedora is
>> aiming for a PulseAudio based implementation, which has its own issues.
>> If people really want the per-application controls in g-v-c, they can
>> be added, but its just a time thing. I'd prefer to deal with such a
>> request as an RFE rather than a TCR.
>
> Note the GNOME "gnome-media" module contains two "gnome-volume-control"
> applications, starting with gnome-media version 2.25. One of them
> is called "gst-mixer", and this is the GStreamer based one that we
> have always used. There is also a new "gnome-volume-control" which
> uses PulseAudio. It seems that most distros which use PulseAudio are
> going to switch to using the PulseAudio based one, while distros which
> do not use PulseAudio (or have problems with it) will continue using
> gst-mixer.
>
> This was discussed at length on the GNOME desktop-devel-list.
> Unfortunately, the thread is a mix of different issues, not just related
> to PulseAudio. However, here are a few emails from that thread if you
> have an interest to learn more about what the community is doing:
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00208.html
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00239.html
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00240.html
>
>
> Brian
