[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio and hal deprecation/DeviceKit.

[Maxim Levitsky]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 15:21 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 11.05.09 16:14, Maxim Levitsky (maximlevitsky at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > What is wrong with HAL?
> >
> > Could you explain, give links (google doesn't seem to find that)
> > This seem to be rather big news for me
> 
> Been living under a rock?
I guess so :-)

> 
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-May/011560.html

I have just read it, but thanks anyway.

I still don't get. OK they want to replace yet another system that works
more or less, but:

1 - like he says, hal will still be there, just like libbonbo is.


2 - there will be huge wave of very unpleasant bugs, and again there
will be release or two containing most of them (remember folks, you
don't have the money to buy every system/device) in the world to test.
And while users do report bugs, its time consuming for user and
developer  to do remote debugging.

Remember what pulseaudio did with sound?
(Although I agree that we need pulseaudio)


Just an example, we have a linux lab at my university.
Users bring usb sticks, plug it in, and it doesn't work.
(I figured out that this is due to stale .hal-mtab file in /media)

So, I reported this, but others just curse linux....
Now imagine all that breakage DeviceKit will bring?


I want to repeat: linux (and I mean everything kernel and userspace) has
VERY limited developer base, and the user base mostly does nothing.
Kernel developers smart enough to understand that very well, and thus
you see it both working and being better and better.
(and yet they do have significant developer base)


Thus ONLY incremental changes are possible (and no 'buts' or 'ifs')
Even if you create an experimental branch (like kernel mode-setting) it
just won't progress, because developers are already full of bug fixing
the current stuff that user use.
Even now, I hear that modesetting still crashes the system there and
there.


Of course there are things that has to be rewritten, for example there
is really a need for single userspace daemon for sound, thus I don't
curse is when it doesn't work, modesetting also is included in that
list.


So back to pulseaudio, I think that what developers should do is to
rewrite alsa mixer, and device enumeration.

Since this is the first complain I hear about linux : my sound doesn't
work!

(I strongly believe that it is possible to write a generic hda driver,
and make it work with most computers without magic initialization for
each and every laptop model out there)

I post set of my ideas about the above later.


Best regards,
	Maxim Levitsky