[pulseaudio-discuss] status report of gsoc

[rong deng]

Hi PulseAudio community,

This is Deng Zhengrong, a member of this year's GSoC. I'll send the status
report every Friday, as this is my first status report, I'll write about
what I've done till now.

I've mainly focused on enhancement of logging facilities lately. One part
is about adding a category support just as gstreamer does. I've done a
first version, and the draft is sent to this mailing list. What it does is
to register the category upfront and then specify the category in pa_log()
related functions. However with the detailed discussion with my mentor
Arun, he suggests we should do it in a dynamica way which checks whether
the currect category specified exists or not, if it doesn't exist, we
created it on the fly. This advice is good and it could simplify the
implementation in some degree. Then the user could use 'pacmd' or 'pactl'
tool to change the category's log level correspondingly. One massive part
of my code is to add one line to each C file to specify what the current
category this file wants to be in. Overall, this feature could ease the
debugging of developers and make users focuses on what they care about.

Another part of my work is to add the circular buffer to pulseaudio. A
patch is already sent to this mailing list for review. But one drawback it
has is that it uses a mutex lock. So the recent work is to remove the lock.
Discussion with Arun on IRC (also the reply on my proposal from Colin)
suggests we could leverage some work from systemd journal. Therefore, I've
tried to install systemd journal on my old Fedora Core distribution, the
journal is not happy though, after I intalled it and rebooted my linux
machine, it hangs... So some work has been done to recover my Linux system,
quite sad. However, the idea of using one log for each slot is good and I'd
investigate more to see if we can borrow it into pulseaudio.

Other simple contribution include a) replacing strcmp with pa_streq and b)
adding the feature of dynamically changing the log target. The second one
is a simple feature, but its nice to have, at least for me. Sometimes I
don't like the current log target of the running pulseaudio, if we don't
have this feature, we have to kill pulseaudio and restart it again with the
correct log target we want.

So that's all for my status report, my next report would be next Friday,
stay tuned. :D

PS: If someone is interested in each part and has some comments, feel free
to contact me.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/attachments/20120601/b3d6838d/attachment.html>