[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH 0/2] Patches for supporting ALSA UCM

[Janos Kovacs]

> I'm a little confused by this. Can someone give some history as to this
> patcheset?

Sorry about the confusion. Among others, Jaska and myself were in the team that
developed the policy engine for Maemo and later for MeeGo. The Nokia N900 and
the recently launched N9 uses that engine. When we started PA had
nothing in this
area so we built our policy enforcement point as a PA module. It basically made
audio routing, muting and corking.

Recently we joined Intel where the mission somewhat similar. From our
point of view
UCM has many limitations, the use case model is not a natural fit to
PA  but it has a
very appealing feature: the logical devices e.g. 'speaker', 'headset',
'headphone' etc.
Those would allow to make policies, or UI's to specify preferences, easier IMO.

Last month I posted some preliminary ideas on this mailing list
(Subject: [pulseaudio-discuss] Audio routing policy). I tried to
prototype those ideas
to see how they would work in practice.

> Was id developed completely independantly from the other patches
> relating to UCM?

I was looking into some other patches (Margarita Olaya's for instance) but
at the end I decided to make a fresh start. I built my proto top on David's
original jack-detection patches, that used input devices, to make the
generated ports automatically enabled/disabled. Recently I had to shift to
the new 6 patch set.

> Or has this come out of our UCM related discussions in Prague recently
> somehow passed on to yourself?

Now, I was not there and have no idea what was discussed there.

> I'm a little concerned that people are just pushing patches into PA
> without getting the overall design right here (I've not looked at your
> patches so this is just a general concern, not anything specific to your
> work).

Actually, my intention was that PA folks will have a look on this prototype
and say whether this approach is OK or not. So any comment, critics,
proposal etc. is really warmly welcomed.

br
-janos-