Note: This schedule might still not be final. Apart from the six topic leaders, nobody has said that they depend on a specific topic at a specific time, so we reserve the possibility to shuffle things around, as well as start earlier on a topic if the previous one ended earlier. The time for each topic is quite hard to predict :-) === 09.30 Conference start Reserved time to organize chairs, make sure we have equipment, people, etc 09.45 PulseAudio - vision and mission What do we want PulseAudio to be? What are we working for? How important is it for us to be the standard sound server in desktop/laptop as well as the embedded distributions? Other important use cases for PulseAudio? Are some distributions more important than others? Can we unify our visions for where we see PulseAudio in a few years time? Topic leader: David Henningsson 10.30 Is there any way we can increase the patch review capacity? The pile of unreviewed patches keeps growing. I don't have much ideas for improving this beyond "just work harder", but maybe someone else does... Topic leader: Tanu Kaskinen 10.45 Coffee break 11.00 Routing priority list infrastructure A year ago or even more, Colin Guthrie had some ideas on how to improve the routing infrastructure in PulseAudio, but it is still not (fully) implemented. Until it's there, we're hacking around the current limitations with e g modules such as module-switch-on-port-available, have rerouting problems at suspend/resume, etc. Also, Janos Kovacs and Jaska Uimonen has started implementing some kind of priority/policy infrastructure, which we will also be discussing. Topic leaders: Janos Kovacs, Jaska Uimonen, Colin Guthrie 11.45 Improving low latency behaviour Discussion about how we can make PulseAudio perform better in low latency scenarios, such as VOIP or gaming. In particular, the issue of latency increasing over time (as occasional underruns occur) should be somehow resolved. 12.15 Combining system-wide and per-user modes I think the hardware should be accessed by a system-wide pulseaudio instance. This would finally solve the issue that root/mpd/whatever can't have sound while someone else is logged in. The drawbacks of the system-wide mode can be avoided by having also per-user instances taking care of the per-user stuff. Topic leader: Tanu Kaskinen, Colin Guthrie 12.45 Misc minor things * Remove HAL?, Planning for a major bump? * Disable esound by default * Flash (specifically Recording) Topic leader: Colin Guthrie 13.00 Lunch 14.00 Improving surround sound behaviour More and more laptops have built in subwoofers; how can we handle/enable this in the best way? Also; can we use jack detection to determine whether a certain profile should be available or not? Topic leader: Arun Raghavan, David Henningsson, Colin Guthrie 14.45 Testing I would like to see us adding more tests -- the amount of code/features that we add is much much larger that corresponding tests. Part of the problem is that there is still missing infrastructure to make this easy enough (we don't have an automated way to test that playback actually works, for example). Deng's work during the GSoC should make a lot of things a lot easier, so this would likely just be a small discussion about what kind of extensions we need, and maybe finding some way to tie that up into a CI system if possible. Topic leader: Arun Raghavan 15.15 Unified ALSA config xdistro It seems the different distros have different approaches here. Automatic, semi-automatic etc. It would be nice to have a common approach here. (I suspect I may lose my personal preference here, but I'd rather go with consistency across distros than fight too hard for my own preference!) Topic leader: Colin Guthrie 15.30 Base Volume options It's just about how to handle the presentation and inclusion of "base volumes" generally. Topic leader: Colin Guthrie 15.45 Devices with dynamic capabilities (e g HDMI) HDMI in particular can change its PCM capabilities, i e, maybe you first have one monitor connected that supports 5.1 LPCM, and you then unplug and plug in another one that only supports stereo. How do we update/reprobe/etc PulseAudio accordingly to support this? And how does it relate to the just pushed patches that can add profiles/ports dynamically? Topic leader: David Henningsson 16.00 Coffee break 16.15 User experience We've come a long way from in terms of being invisible to users (as we should be), but I still see a large number of people facing difficulties, often in "standard bugs". This includes programs grabbing the ALSA device, tsched=0 fixes, port switching, running mpd, and probably others that I can't remember. What I'd like to discuss is ways for us to deal with these sort of problems and help solve them quickly. My current thinking is some sort of program/script to help people quickly pin point problems and find solutions. This is really matter of automating the standard diagnostics we ask for on IRC, and documenting the standard solutions. (David pointed me to Ubuntu's diagnostic tool, which is a good starting point) Topic leader: Arun Raghavan 16.45 Separate configuration for hw adaptation, core and policy In the non-desktop world there is often a need to ship different configuration files for different hardware, and also different UIs may need different pulseaudio policy configuration (I think this latter point potentially applies also to the desktop world). This can be solved with some packaging tricks, but I would like to make things easier by having the separation also in upstream. Topic leader: Tanu Kaskinen 17.15 Better drain/underrun reporting behaviour We more than once has got reports that 1) drains take seconds too long to complete 2) underruns are reported before all samples sent have been actually played back, and sometimes a audio glitch can be avoided even when an underrun has been reported to the client. Can we get almost sample accuracy on when we report back that underrun/drain has occurred? Topic leader: David Henningsson 17.45 End of conference -- David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd. https://launchpad.net/~diwic
