Pipewire Hackfest 2018

Good morning from Edinburgh, where the breakfast contains haggis, and the charity shops have some interesting finds.

My main goal in attending this hackfest was to discuss Pipewire integration in the desktop, and how it will eventually replace PulseAudio as the audio daemon.

The main problem GNOME has had over the years with PulseAudio relate mostly to how PulseAudio was a black box when it came to its routing policy. What happens when you plug in an HDMI cable into your laptop? Or turn on your Bluetooth headset? I've heard the stories of folks with highly mobile workstations having to constantly visit the Sound settings panel.

PulseAudio has policy scattered in a number of places (do a "git grep routing" inside the sources to see that): some are in the device manager, then modules themselves can set priorities for their outputs and inputs. But there's nothing to take all the information in, and take a decision based on the hardware that's plugged in, and the applications currently in use.

For Pipewire, the policy decisions would be split off from the main daemon. Pipewire, as it gains PulseAudio compatibility layers, will grow a default/example policy engine that will try to replicate PulseAudio's behaviour. At the very least, that will mean that Pipewire won't regress compared to PulseAudio, and might even be able to take better decisions in the short term.

For GNOME, we still wanted to take control of that part of the experience, and make our own policy decisions. It's very possible that this engine will end up being featureful and generic enough that it will be used by more than just GNOME, or even become the default Pipewire one, but it's far too early to make that particular decision.

In the meanwhile, we wanted the GNOME policies to not be written in C, difficult to experiment with for power users, and for edge use cases. We could have started writing a configuration language, but it would have been too specific, and there are plenty of embeddable languages around. It was also a good opportunity for me to finally write the helper library I've been meaning to write for years, based on my favourite embedded language, Lua.

So I'm introducing Anatole. The goal of the project is to make it trivial to write chunks of programs in Lua, while the core of your project is written in C (we might even be able to embed it in Python or Javascript, once introspection support is added).

It's still in the very early days, and unusable for anything as of yet, but progress should be pretty swift. The code is mostly based on Victor Toso's incredible "Lua factory" plugin in Grilo. (I'm hoping that, once finished, I won't have to remember on which end of the stack I need to push stuff for Lua to do something with it ;)