[alsa-devel] [PATCH 2/2] ALSA: Integrate control based jack reporting with core jack reporting

[Mark Brown]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 02:08:52PM +0100, David Henningsson wrote:
> On 02/10/2012 11:55 AM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > David Henningsson wrote:

> >> I guess it could be easier to parse if we avoid spaces in names,

> > Exactly, it was the reason.

> Given that the normal desktop user does not usually look at these values 
> these days, I'd say being parser friendly weighs heavier than being 
> "normal English".

Not all the world is desktop.

> > OTOH, we can take an optional directional suffix, i.e.
> > "[location] base [direction] [channel]", too.  For example, base can
> > be "Video" or "Line", and direction can be "Out" or "In".

> > I'd like to hear rather comments from others.

> I think both naming schemes are good, and I'm not too worried about them 
> being too verbose. If we run into names being longer than the string 
> length we could back off and drop the location, I guess.

It's a complete pain for actually working with them and doing
development - it renders badly in UIs (think about alsamixer for
example, or people looking at things on 80 column terminals) and isn't
friendly to people typing things in.

> If we extend the thought about applying this scheme for mixer control 
> names as well, we might run into controls that apply to two outputs but 
> not the third, and then the complexity will increase, like "Front 
> HP,Line-Out Playback Switch". (And what if the Headphone is located on 
> the Front side and the Line-Out is on the back, etc) But then we run 
> into the entire story of exposing a graph instead, I guess. :-/

There's no solution except to expose a graph - modern devices are going
to have sufficiently flexible routing that most of the controls have no
association with a particular output (or input for that matter).