On 04/24/2009 08:03 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
So, in the spirit of light rather than heat, here's my proposal, again, rescued from the depths of the flamefest, with some actual work attached. g-v-c is clearly intending to be an abstracted and simplified volume control app / applet to cover the most common use cases in a friendly way. Great. It's clear, though, that some users have needs beyond this, which are likely only going to be satisfied in a sensible way by access direct to the ALSA mixer elements. Bastien and Lennart don't want some kind of hack to expose these via g-v-c, and I'd tend to agree, that's clearly not what it's designed for. So my proposal is that we include by default an alternative GUI app which allows direct access to the mixer channels. This won't be an applet or anything else persistent, just an application that you can choose to run if you need that level of access. Basically the same as Lennart's "just use alsamixer" suggestion, only a GUI app that will be more discoverable and easier for most people to use (it's a bit tricky to figure out 'alsamixer -c0 -Vcapture', for instance). At first I suggested including the XFCE mixer for this purpose, but now that feels a bit awkward. It's really part of XFCE, its menu entry is just named 'Mixer' and renaming it to something appropriate for GNOME might not be appropriate for XFCE. And it has a slightly odd interface rather than the 'immediate screenful o' sliders' that people are used to from the old g-v-c. So I suggest what we should do is resurrect gnome-alsamixer. It's still technically part of GNOME - it's even got moved to the new GNOME git. Other distributions still package it (Debian, for e.g.) It's even had a few commits within the last year or so. It was more or less deprecated in favour of g-v-c, but now we have a case where it may make sense to have two clearly differentiated apps, and gnome-alsamixer is the obvious choice. I just pulled the latest code out of git and threw together a package (based on the spec from Mandriva, since I had it lying around). It builds and works fine - you get the kind of interface most people will be expected, a tabbed window with each of your available output devices on a tab, and the typical 'bunch o' sliders' layout for each device. In the package I've added a menu entry with the name "Advanced Volume Control" and the comment "Full hardware access volume control application". The package is available here: http://adamwill.fedorapeople.org/gnome-alsamixer/ (the SRPM, spec file, and an x86-64 build for current Rawhide). Please take a look at it if you're interested. Just to reinforce this, gnome-alsamixer shouldn't interfere with Pulse or g-v-c at all; it doesn't run persistently, it doesn't mess anything up in gconf or anywhere else that would affect those. All it does is let you poke the raw mixer elements, just like alsamixer only graphically. I know the GNOME folks are generally opposed to having two apps that do 'the same thing', but it's very clear from the long threads on this list and elsewhere that g-v-c really doesn't do the things that many people need it to do as of yet. If we ship with just g-v-c as a graphical 'mixer' available by default we will wind up telling many many people to drop to a console and use alsamixer - and annoying a lot more people who don't ask, find the release notes, or figure out how to use alsamixer on their own. I really don't see how providing an alternative graphical mixer app is worse than that.
This gets a big +1 from me! Regards, Hans -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
