Hi all, I am new to the list and would like to introduce myself. My name is Patryk Zawadzki and I am one of the PLD Linux developers.
This said, I'd like to ask a question (hope this was not discussed here like two days ago as my internet connection is faulty and I am unable to search through the mailing list archives). Today most applications either rely on external programs like "aplay" and "esdplay" or they use the desktop-specific sound frameworks directly to handle their sound events. We do have a working specification for icon themes so why not just adapt a similar specification for sound events? I originally started this as a bug in GNOME bugzilla but it does not seem to be a good place for the discussion as I'd like freedesktop to take care of that. The idea is to create a robust sound event handling system based on DBUS that would allow an application to tell the daemon to "play gaim-user-online with priority of notification," let the daemon handle the event and let the app forget about it completely. To me such a daemon specification and a "sound theme" specification would be a great start for even futher integration between various desktop environments and between apps and their desktops as well. The original bug is here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374073 For those not willing to click links, I will paste it below, the rest can just ignore the rest of this post ;) --- 8< --- Create a new DBus-driven desktop sound event daemon. Not for playing media streams, just to play the usual desktop sounds like "login," "logout," "IM user is online" and such. As I see it, the daemon should make use of a directory tree similar to /usr/share/themes, where there are "sound themes" and each theme is split into a number of subdirectories like "apps," "actions" and similar. There should be a base theme like there is "hicolor" for GTK that allows apps to provide their own generic sound events. Each theme could override these sounds by providing a file with identical base name in its own directory. Similar caching techniques could be used as are currently in use for GTK themes. The DBus interface should provide a way to play a generic sound event by name (without the extension, the daemon should be able to find a matching file and use gstreamer to play it). This would allow for easy handling of non-blocking event sounds in virtually all desktop applications without relying on forking to execute "aplay" or "esdplay" as some do currently. Additionally all sound should have a priority attribute, one of "notice," "normal," "warning," "critical." Ideally the sound applet should be able to talk to the daemon and tell it to suppress all sound below a chosen threshold so I can opt to only hear critical events while watching a movie in totem. If you talk this over with freedesktop guys, this can provide perfect interoperability between GNOME and KDE apps in the terms of sound event handling. Hope above is clear enough. Not sure where to post this so I just put it under esound. Would love to hear your opinion on this. Cheers, -- Patryk Zawadzki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PLD Linux _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
