On Tue, 2012-10-23 at 10:14 +0200, David Henningsson wrote: > On 10/23/2012 08:01 AM, Mikel Astiz wrote: > > Hi David, > > > > On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 6:10 PM, David Henningsson > > <david.henningsson at canonical.com> wrote: > >> On 10/22/2012 10:46 AM, Mikel Astiz wrote: > >>> > >>> From: Mikel Astiz <mikel.astiz at bmw-carit.de> > >>> > >>> Some cards might need to add profiles during their lifetime, that is, > >>> after the card has been created. > >> > >> > >> How are volume control UIs, other modules, etc made aware that the profiles > >> or ports of a card has changed? > > > > I believe the D-Bus API as well as the subscription events would have > > to be extended for this purpose, but I haven't addressed either of > > these here. Any thoughts? > > Just that being able to change a card in ways that was not possible > before, is something that require careful thought. Removal even more so; > what if a volume control UI starts (that was built before we made this > change), and suddenly a profile is removed, and then the user tries to > select this profile? The UI will get an error from pulseaudio. Do you see a problem with that? The UI should be prepared to receive errors from every operation anyway, so it shouldn't crash. It may choose to exit "cleanly" in case of unexpected errors, though, but I'd argue that that's a bad way to handle this kind of errors. > I'm also not sure if there are other parts of the PulseAudio core that > needs to know if things like these change, do you know? I grepped for "profiles" and "ports", and it looked like the only thing needing patching is modules/dbus/iface-card.c, and Mikel provided the necessary patch for that. You might ask whether it was enough to grep for "profiles" and "ports" - I think it was, because if any component is going to maintain data structures that need to be in sync with pa_card.profiles and pa_card.ports, then it will probably at some point reference pa_card.profiles or pa_card.ports... > I'm not opposed to the change, maybe it is inevitable - e g, the > capabilities of HDMI sinks can also change during PulseAudio's life > time, so that's another example of dynamic profiles. What I'm trying to > say here is that: > > 1) This is a quite fundamental change of behaviour, have we thought this > through thoroughly, with all the consequences not only for us but for > our client software as well? I'm pretty confident that this is a safe change (in terms of not breaking well made apps - this may very well expose bugs in apps with not-so-good error handling). > 2) I don't want to release with this being half-done; e g, if we add > profiles without a subscription mechanism and then release, we might end > up with volume control UIs polling us all the time to work around our > own shortcomings. Card change subscription event will be sent. Are you ok with me pushing the patches? -- Tanu
