[pulseaudio-discuss] Notification and feedback system (was: Re: Multiseat and pulseaudio)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 30.07.08 22:51, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:

> Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > padevchooser is not unfixable. It's just that someone should sit down
> > and get rid of the braindamage that is in there. Patches welcome.
> 
> I've been wanting to write a pa subsystem for a while that could ask the 
> user some questions and await feedback, but I'm not really 100% sure if 
> it's sensible or not.

If you want to synchronously ask questions on certain events this
might be problematic. (because applications don't expect this. They
assume that creating a playback stream is takes no time. However, if
you pop up a dialog in that case this will cause the client creating
the stream is frozen. 

OTOH if things happen asynchronously everything should be
fine. (i.e. let the connection go through, ask the user, and then
changeit while it is already existing)

> I was thinking of something pretty simple that would be capable of:
>    1. Simple notification popups for information (detected new network 
> device, new USB device etc.)
>    2. Simple yes/no questions. (New Sink found, do you want to move all 
> active streams to it and set it as default?)

/me is not a fan of unnecesary questions...

>    3. Ask simple questions (Your apple airport device requires a 
> username and password, please enter it now.)

That makes a lot of sense. Though I am not sure how the internal
control flow for this would look like.

> I would envisage that the core would be extended to provide a few 
> functions that modules could call to do the necessary and then I'd 
> expect a module could be written to register as a "notification 
> handler". That would allow for a module that interfaces with e.g. 
> libnotify to be written (this would allow for a different KDE module to 
> be written too).
> 
> 
> For 1 and 2, it would be pretty simple Nut for 3 it could be a bit more 
> complex.
> 
> Lennart, have you got any thoughts on this? Am I way off track here or 
> is this vaguely sensible?

Yes, padevchooser already did the notification stuff, however did it
from the wrong source. I think haveing a client side agent like this
makes a lot of sense.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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