[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH 21/23] Introduce pa_router

[David Henningsson]

On 11/25/2013 09:11 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 04:50 +0100, David Henningsson wrote:
>> On 11/20/2013 10:26 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
>>> Router modules will create a pa_router object, and extend its
>>> functionality with callbacks. There can be only one router in the
>>> system at a time. At this first stage, the only functionality the base
>>> pa_router is to notify the router modules about new and removed nodes.
>>
>> Then there is another concept we can take away to keep it simple atm -
>> there is no need to have a "base pa_router", you can just notify the
>> router implementation through hooks instead.
> 
> One point of pa_router is that it's ensured that there's only one router
> loaded at a time in the system. That's useful, because a router is
> responsible of managing all stream routing and profile and port
> activation, so having two routers in the system would make the behaviour
> unpredictable when those two routers conflict.

We currently have a system where several modules to their own part of
the routing. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's quite flexible. If
only one router can be active at a time, that sounds less
flexible/configurable.

> Another benefit of a dedicated object is that it's easier to define a
> proper interface for the routers. It's usually not documented what a
> hook callback is expected to do. I failed with the naming and
> documentation of the pa_router_add_node() function and the associated
> callback, though. That really isn't any better than a hook in terms of
> interface clarity. I should have named it
> pa_router_set_initial_routing() or something like that, because setting
> the initial routing for a node is what the router is expected to do.
> 
> One more benefit of not using hooks is that hooks can have just one
> "call data" parameter. I extended the interface of pa_router.add_node()
> yesterday:
> 
> int (*add_node)(pa_router *router, pa_node *node, pa_node **initial_connections, unsigned n_initial_connections);

Eh, I thought the router was supposed to determine and set the initial
connections, but now it looks like you're sending the initial
connections into the router instead...?

> So it can now return an error, and it has access to the requested
> initial connections. This is more cumbersome to do with hooks. I have to
> either define a new struct holding the connection request data that will
> be passed to the hook, or I'll have to add fields to pa_node that
> contain that same information (not nice, because the information is
> relevant only at the node creation phase).
> 
> Those were the reasons why I prefer pa_router over just using hooks.
> Tell me if you changed your mind and you prefer pa_router too, otherwise
> I'll remove pa_router for now and make do with hooks.





-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic