whither xfce4-mixer?

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Allin Cottrell <cottrell at wfu.edu> [2013-04-13 01:59]:
> 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.

Since the current xfce4-mixer is closely tied to that API it
would need to be moved to a different mixer API, the only one I
can think of is pulseaudio, which everyone else seems to be using
now. But that would basically mean a rewrite from scratch, not
something that I and, I suppose, Jannis have time for. So it
depends on somebody stepping up to do that work.
-- 
Guido Berhoerster