[pulseaudio-discuss] [RFC 0/5] bluetooth: Use BlueZ's media API only

[Luiz Augusto von Dentz]

Hi Tanu,

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-11-17 at 23:41 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote:
>> On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 16:12 +0100, Mikel Astiz wrote:
>> > The following patches propose the removal of the old (to be deprecated)
>> > socket-based IPC mechanism. A lot of code is removed so please review
>> > this carefully, since we have been able to do limited testing only.
>> >
>> > These patches require some fixes in BlueZ, which have been submitted
>> > to the corresponding mailing list.
>> >
>> > Mikel Astiz (5):
>> >   bluetooth: Fix property reply handling for hfgw
>> >   bluetooth: Avoid duplicating profile argument twice
>> >   bluetooth: Avoid using IPC mechanism to BlueZ
>> >   bluetooth: Removed library for IPC to BlueZ
>> >   bluetooth: Change profile to a2dp_source automatically
>>
>> Is this meant to be RFC only or are the patches good to merge. Patches
>> 1, 2 and 5 look fine to me. 3 and 4 are likely a no-go. Luiz and I spoke
>> about this a few weeks ago, and I am given to understand the BlueZ Media
>> API has been around for a few months?
>>
>> While it's nice to move with the times and use the current API, I
>> wouldn't want to leave people who are dependent on old versions of bluez
>> in the lurch. In general, I'm fine with dropping support for
>> dependencies that are more than a year old.
>>
>> Colin, Tanu, desktop/embedded packagers -- thoughts?
>
> Speaking as one of the embedded packagers - for us this would be fine,
> since we already use the Media API. But otherwise this seems very
> questionable. The important thing is how many users' distro still
> provides only the old BlueZ interface. I'd expect that to be a large
> number. Replacing a system daemon is a major hassle, so it would be very
> hard to upgrade to a newer Pulseaudio version if bluetooth functionality
> is needed. Even one year seems a bit short time to me.

You guessed it right, the Media interface is around already for about
a year, so it is not new by any means. There are several shortcoming
with the unix socket IPC and as you notice there are already people
using Media API in production, as I mentioned in the other mail the
only thing missing is deprecating the socket IPC which should be done
in the next BlueZ release. For the next major release of BlueZ, which
is around the corner, it was decided that the socket IPC gonna be
completely removed.

The only reason I didn't send a patch already is because I want PA to
depend on the new version of BlueZ which should have Media API enabled
by default, but due to kernel.org problems we were delayed quite a
bit, if distros don't want to upgrade it is their call but I don't
think this should stop us from syncing this work.

-- 
Luiz Augusto von Dentz