Glitch-Free PulseAudio in Rawhide

[Dimi Paun]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 12:53 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> >   * Volume Control gives a cryptic error about a connection being lost
> 
> Is it really that cryptic? It says exactly what happened: the
> connection to the sound server is lost.

It is completely irrelevant that this is exactly what happens.
In fact, you could say that "a number of bytes don't reach a process
via file descriptor 7" and it would be exactly what happens, all
at the same time being a cryptic and bad error message.

Do you really think a non technical user knows what a "server" is,
especially in this context? If you are tempted to reply yes, don't
bother, it Just Plain Wrong (TM).

> >   * Unless you know (how?!?) that you need a 'pulseaudio -D', you
> >     have to reboot the machine to get working sound
> 
> I guess that's something one could say about 99% of all bugs.

Not by a long shot. If an app crashes, _anybody_ knows to restart it. On
this other hand, sound is a system feature that must work. The fact that
it doesn't without frequent reboots reflects a design problem -- sound
must restart automagically, not require the user to reboot every hour or
so to recover this essential desktop feature!

For fsck's sake, I didn't have to reboot Windows 3.1 that often!

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.