A lot of new hardware has a Front channel as the primary speaker volume; by having it not shown, it leads to some "interesting" behavior including no volume sliders at all for some laptops
Should be pretty straight forward to fix. IMO, this is yet another ALSA bug, showing too much of its internals to user space.
Created attachment 230331 [details] gvc-add-front-track.patch Simple patch
Looks reasonable to me FWIW
Filed upstream at: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487623 Fix building in gnome-media-2.20.1-3.fc8