[pulseaudio-discuss] RFC: Switch to HDMI or not?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2016-02-04 at 11:35 +0100, David Henningsson wrote:
> 
> On 2016-02-04 08:47, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> > 04.02.2016 10:45, David Henningsson пишет:
> > >   6b) It seems non-trivial, and I have a gut feeling it will break some
> > > other use case, that neither of us is thinking about right now.
> > 
> > Based on our past experience here, I agree.

This same point can equally well be made for David's proposal, though.

> > >   6c) I realize neither of 6a) or 6b) are particularly strong arguments
> > > against actually fixing a problem...
> > 
> > I think here you meant "trying to fix".
> > 
> > I also think the real problem here is to convince others that you have
> > indeed fixed the original problem :) so for me 6b is strong enough.
> > 
> 
> Internal speakers toggle between "no" and "unknown" today; i e, when you 
> unplug your headphones, internal speakers go to "unknown" rather than 
> "yes". This somewhat indicates that speakers are now available, but you 
> did not make an active choice to use them.

Here's a plausible use case that will break in a very annoying way with
your proposal and doesn't break with my proposal: let's say that the
user prefers to use headphones when they are plugged in, and the
internal speakers when the headphones are not plugged in, and never the
HDMI output. Now whenever headphones are disconnected, the routing
logic that you propose will choose the HDMI output, because it has
higher priority than the internal speakers. With my proposal the system
remembers that the internal speakers are the preferred output port of
the sound card (which is actually a misrepresentation of the user's
intent, because the user prefers the headphones over the internal
speakers, but luckily that issue is masked by the speakers becoming
unavailable when the headphones are plugged in).

-- 
Tanu