[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] module-gsettings: new module to store configuration using gsettings

[Felipe Sateler]

On 26 September 2016 at 06:27, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-09-21 at 13:04 +0200, Sylvain Baubeau wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> First of all, I do not work for Fedora. I happen to use it, that's about
>> it. Please don't blame Fedora for my less-than-perfect patch.
>
> Ok, thanks for the clarification.
>
>> I did the paprefs patch to make the upgrade process easier but it seems it
>> makes it harder so I suggest we forget about the paprefs migration to
>> gsettings and stick to gconf.
>>
>> In this case, I don't really see a problem with the upgrade :
>> By default, module-gsettings is disabled and module-gconf stays enabled and
>> nothing will change if the distribution maintainer does nothing.
>>
>> If a distribution wants to move to gsettings, it could do so during a major
>> upgrade of the distro (that would probably update Gnome, the kernel and
>> would require a session restart). They could decide to enable both modules
>> - so that old programs keep working and new ones could use the new module -
>> or switch completely to gsettings, after they make sure all programs
>> packaged by the distribution have a migration script.
>
> (A sidenote: paprefs is (at least I hope so) the only application that
> uses this stuff, so we don't need to worry about others.)
>
> It would be nice to have thoughts from actual package maintaners about
> this.

I have to say I'm not sure how an upgrade scenario would play out. My
understanding currently is as follows:

1. paprefs can ship a file for gsettings-data-convert, which migrates
the settings.
2. However that tool is only run at login.
3. As a consequence, the paprefs tool can be in an inconsistent state
after an upgrade and before the next login.

It seems that the problem is resolved by papfrefs triggering the tool
on startup as suggested by the gnome documentation[1].

However that leaves us with another problem, as the pulseaudio daemon
is not restarted automatically after an upgrade, and thus gsettings
module might not be loaded. But, I hope paprefs can already deal with
such a scenario and prompt the user accordingly.

In debian there is only paprefs depending on module-gconf. I don't
think we'll keep module-gconf after paprefs has migrated.

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/gstreamer-sdk/data/docs/latest/gio/ch29s07.html

-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler