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

[Maxim Levitsky]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 16:10 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 11.05.09 16:47, Maxim Levitsky (maximlevitsky at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > 1 - like he says, hal will still be there, just like libbonbo is.
> 
> I figure you mean libbonobo? The phasing out is mostly done AFAIK,
> with the exception of the panel.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> HAL is pretty buggy too. It's sometimes ridiculous. For example, it
> patches ACLs *after* it sent out signals that a device was created, to
> the effect that when PA tries to open the device then it often enough
> cannot because the access fails.
> 
> > 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)
> 
> Yes, HAL is broken in many ways.
> 
> HAL was a first attempt to figure out what we actually want on
> Linux. Now we know that pretty well, so the second try is hopefully
> going to be a bit smoother.
> 
> Also note that the process to swich to udev has been going on since
> quite some time. In F11 quite a few subsystems have already been
> switched over. A few are still remaining.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Those changes are mostly incremental. HAL and the new udev/dkit stuff
> do not conflict. Things are moved over bit-by-bit.
Nice to hear that.
Probably then I worry about that too much then.


> 
> In the end in Free Software it's always at the developer's discretion
> how things are handled. If you want to have a greater influence on how
> things are handled, become a developer of the specific project too!
> And I'll promise you you'll start to see things more like the other
> devs by doing so.
I am not a developer yet, but I think I agree with you.
Although I do report bugs, and sometimes even fix them.

Speaking of which, few words:

First I discovered that skype doesn't work well with PA 0.9.14 ether.
while I hear sound, the echo suppression logic is very broken.
Probably is is better to leave that junk alone.



Best regards,
	Maxim Levitsky