whither xfce4-mixer?

[Allin Cottrell]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2013, Guido Berhoerster wrote:

> * Allin Cottrell <cottrell at wfu.edu> [2013-04-11 18:25]:
>> I wonder if anyone is thinking about what to do with xfce4-mixer now
>> that gstreamer 1.0 is released, and the old mixer API is gone? The
>> prospect is that before too long, as the distros update gstreamer,
>> running xfce4-mixer will require a parallel installation of the
>> obsolete gstreamer 0.10.
>>
>> It's a bother that the mixer API has been removed, but the argument
>> is that using gst is not the right way to do this, and that mixers
>> should interface directly with ALSA.
>>
>> Sorry to be just a consumer -- I'm unlikely to have time to
>> contribute patches -- but I'd note that if anyone's thinking of
>> working on this, looking at gamix might be useful. It's a perfectly
>> good GUI ALSA mixer, except that it uses the long-obsolete GTK 1.2.
>> The ALSA interface code might be reusable.
>
> alsa-lib is very low-level and it is Linux-only, so you don't
> want to base a mixer directly on it but use some kind of
> abstraction layer and once you start doing that you are
> reinventing libgstmixer which doesn't make sense.
>
> Note also that until the rewrite for Xfce 4.6 xfce4-mixer did
> exactly this, it had its own abstraction layer with different
> backends which was quite buggy and actually lacked abstraction,
> making it as cluttered as gamix or gnome-alsamixer back in
> the day.

Still leaves the question: what to do with xfce4-mixer now 
that there's no mixer API in current gstreamer? Presumably we 
don't want to rely on the unmaintained API of an obsolete 
gstreamer version indefinitely.

-- 
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC