Comment 61 for bug 486154

Just to confirm my previous assertion, I installed the Lucid beta on a virtual machine. I applied my patch [1], restarted metacity, and unloaded and reloaded Pulse Audio's module-x11-bell [2]. System bells rang the same bell.ogg sound file, but through Pulse Audio. Additionally, I could now set the volume with `xset b`. Thus, using this patch would result in the *exact same* behavior as currently exists, except that Pulse Audio is making the noise instead of metacity. Stopping the behavior, to reenable to PC speaker, is now just a matter of unloading the module. Additionally, there are fringe benefits:
1) No delay while metacity loads the sample the first time it's needed.
2) No rate limiting of playback by metacity.
3) Consistent handling of system bell events between metacity and compiz.

Honestly, what more is desired? In several bugs related to this, I have yet to hear a good explanation for why metacity should be handling system bell events. Here's a chance to switch this capability to a more sensible sub-system and solve several bugs or potential bugs all at once. Why are we not jumping all over this? (Sorry to sound shrill, but I'm rather frustrated at this point.)

[1] It didn't quite apply cleanly, but it was easy enough to clean up by hand. I wasn't planning on posting a new patch for Lucid, but if it's desired, let me know.

[2] I don't know why un- and re-loading the module-x11-bell was necessary, but I suspect that it's related to the fact that the old metacity had been trapping the system bell events. I suspect, but haven't confirmed, that this won't be necessary once the new metacity is installed and X is restarted.