Re: Fedora 34 Change: Route all Audio to PipeWire (System-Wide Change)

Monday, 23 November 2020

On Mon, 2020-11-23 at 18:20 +0100, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
...
 On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 06:01:18PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
 > On 11/20/20 5:26 PM, Ben Cotton wrote:
 > 
 > > The pulseaudio package will be uninstalled and pipewire-pulse will be
installed.
 > > 
 > > pipewire-pulse does not yet implement all the features of pulseaudio
 > > but it is expected that
 > > comparable functionality will be implemented later. Most notable
 > > features that are likely
 > > not going to be available for fedora 34
 > IMO, this alone disqualifies this plan.
 > 
 > Fedora should be a stable end-user distro and not a testing site for eager
 > devs to test their immature and incomplete works.

   I think Fedora should establish strong "no regressions" rule when
 replacing system software like this.  PulseAudio has had 15 years of
 development, features and fixes.  It is hard to believe pipewire is as
 capable as a replacement now. 
I disagree. This would be incompatible with the "First" foundation.

If we'd had a "no regressions" rule for pre-PA audio, we'd probably
never have landed PA, or not for years. Are things on the whole better
since we did? I'd say yes.

Will our first release with pipewire probably have some bugs that
constitute regressions from the previous audio setup? Almost certainly.
Especially given the sheer amounts of stuff people do - see your config
below - I think we'd find it difficult to have a "no regressions" rule
and still be Fedora. Part of Fedora's job is to adopt new things and
shake some of the initial bugs out of them.

...
   Of course we would need to start with collecting the use cases,
and
 this will be different for every user.  For example, I frequently use my
 laptop with 3 sound devices present: built-in speakers, speakers
 connected to USB-C dock and bluetooth headphones*.  I use pavucontrol to
 route applications to proper output/input and I expect this to work the
 same with PW.  This is important to me. 
Did that all work with the first Fedora with PA in it? I bet not. Would
we have as capable a PA today if Fedora hadn't taken the leap to
include PA? Probably not.

...
   On the other hand, I do not use AC3 passthrough when watching
movies
 and I'm not so much interested in power saving through dynamic
 latency/timers adjustment and suspending outputs.  If this ceased to
 work, _I_ wouldn't notice.  But for someone this may be crucial. The
 same for equalizer modules. Or volume ramp up. Or multiple device
 combining. And so on. 
Yes, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on...

...
   Right now "How to test" section of Change Proposal
contains only very
 rudimentary cases like "check if rhythmbox plays".  This is not enough
 when replacing as potent software as PulseAudio. 
*This*, though, I tend to agree with. "How to test" sections do tend to
be mailed in. It would be good to cover at least a range of commonly
used configurations here.

QA folks, this is definitely a Change that (if approved) we should do a
Test Day (or several) for, and probably one that could use help with a
better test plan. Do we have any domain experts who'd like to volunteer
to work on that? Thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net

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