[pulseaudio-discuss] Configuration system proposal

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2016-01-18 at 09:59 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> Hi folks,
> Tanu already brought this up, posting some context:
> 
> On Fri, 2016-01-15 at 19:52 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> > Arun commented in IRC that another alternative would be to use the
> > "configuration system"[1] that Arun would like to implement. Although
> > I
> > had some reservations at first, I now think that the proposed
> > configuration system fits this use case well, so I have nothing
> > against
> > doing the hardware volume toggle implementation that way. The recent
> > discussion about the configuration system has been only between Arun
> > and me in IRC, however, so it may be that others disagree about the
> > desirability of the new system. Feedback about that, too, would be
> > very
> > welcome.
> >  
> > [1] https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/Developer/ConfigurationSystem/
> 
> Comments would indeed be welcome, and I'm happy to expand on any of the
> bits that aren't clear as well.

I have a question regarding the on-disk format. Let's say that we have
an alsa card that has options hardware_volume_enabled and ignore_dB.
hardware_volume_enabled is a core option, i.e. not specific to alsa,
and ignore_dB is specific to alsa. The current proposal would probably
be to write the options on disk as follows:

core.port.<card_name>.port.<port_name>.hardware_volume_enabled = true
alsa.port.<card_name>.port.<port_name>.ignore_dB = true

What do you think of the following alternative format?

[core.port <card_name>.port.<port_name>]
hardware_volume_enabled = true

[alsa.port <card_name>.port.<port_name>]
ignore_dB = true

I would prefer this approach, because it seems cleaner to me, and it's
more consistent with how the existing alsa mixer configuration looks
like.

> I'm not sure exactly when I'll be able to get to this, but having the
> basic ideas hammered out should make it easier to get started whenever
> time allows (or for anyone else to jump in as well).

I plan to jump in...

-- 
Tanu