On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 09:31 +0100, Mikel Astiz wrote: > >>> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote: > >>> > >>>> I've changed my mind about the last point. Ports are not really that > >>>> close to the ideal "routing endpoint" concept. For example, on cellular > >>>> phones, pulseaudio may not have access to the actual audio data to and > >>>> from the cellular modem. Modeling the cellular modem with sinks and > >>>> sources doesn't therefore make much sense, in my opinion. Ports are > >>>> pretty tightly coupled to sinks and sources, and I think it makes sense > >>>> to keep things that way. It's still necessary to model the cellular > >>>> modem routing somehow in pulseaudio, but ports don't seem like the best > >>>> choice here. > > What's the reason to have such a strict mapping between ports and sink/sources? > > If this could be relaxed, and ports could be associated to multiple > sink/sources, then it's possible that the routing would be using > sink/sources, while the ports would be representing physical devices > and thus shown in the UI. > > This could avoid adding this new "routing node", which introduces a > third abstraction layer with concepts that are very close to each > other. > > Otherwise, if this 1:1 mapping between ports and sink/sources is so > strict, wouldn't it make sense to merge them? Yes, I've held the opinion for quite some time now that sinks/sources should be merged with ports. It's a big change and doesn't bring any new features in itself, so I don't consider it as a high-priority thing, but patches are welcome. -- Tanu
