[pulseaudio-discuss] flat volumes for privileged apps

[Wim Taymans]

Hi all,

Now that we are talking about flat volumes again (but I don't want to
hijack the other thread), I would like to present another alternative to fix
the problems with flat-volumes.

The idea is that all apps, by default, operate in non-flat volume mode.
This means all volume control done from the app is relative to the master
volume.

Privileged apps can see flat-volumes and thus (indirectly) change the
master volume. One such privileged app is the volume control applet but
it could be possible to manually enable trusted apps (maybe with a switch
in the volume control next to the app stream).

I made a little hack to let you try this, gnome-control-center is a
hardcoded
privileged app but you can see how we can store that in the database later
or how we can hook this into the security framework.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~wtay/pulseaudio/commit/?h=flat-volume-privilege-hack&id=1b203fe6bcc8bba1db1911fd4dbf225f36a6dbb9

I like this idea because:

1) it does not need any new api or changes to apps
2) sets a default that will not cause 100% master volume with misbehaving
    apps
3) has the master/app volume separation that people understand and that is
    also exposed in apps (volume in totem, master in gnome-shell header).
4) still exposes the flat-volume model if needed, which is IMHO the only way
    to sanely increase the volume of just 1 single app (when it needs
adjusting
    the master volume).
5) minimal code changes.

What do you think?

Wim
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