I would like to propose moving support for the PulseAudio sound server into Arch Linux proper. This would also be in preparation for the eventual arrival of Gnome 3, since it will be unlikely we can effectively maintain the needed GStreamer patch any more. To that effect I have created a plan: --- To provide PulseAudio in [extra]... Move the following packages from [community] to [extra]: - libasyncns - rtkit - pulseaudio (split into pulseaudio and libpulse) - alsa-plugins - pulseaudio-alsa Configuration package, contains /etc/asound.conf depends on pulseaudio, alsa-plugins - pavucontrol - paprefs - pulseaudio-mixer-applet - ossp provides osspd OSS emulator Rebuild the following packages with PulseAudio support: - sdl (sdl-pulse in AUR) - openal (openal-pulse in AUR) - libgstreamer0.10-good split gstreamer0.10-pulse (in community) - libao split libao-pulse (in community) - libcanberra split libcanberra-pulse (in community) will be a split plugin instead of a wholly rebuilt copy - gnome-media split gnome-media-pulse (in community; rebuilt with --enable-pulse) - gnome-settings-daemon split gnome-settings-daemon-pulse (in community; rebuilt without gstreamer patch) Provide the following groups: - pulseaudio-gnome pulseaudio-alsa libcanberra-pulse gstreamer0.10-pulse gnome-media-pulse gnome-settings-daemon-pulse --- One of the problems of PulseAudio is that it pretty much becomes the default as soon as you install it: - The client library will start the server if it's not running. - pulseaudio will install .desktop files that autostart the server together with Gnome or KDE. Splitting libpulse would prevent that, but I believe we still need to test on a per-application basis whether we can enable PulseAudio support (with a dependency on libpulse) without breaking fallback to ALSA on systems without pulseaudio. Some packages (like sdl and openal) look for libpulse dynamically and will still work even though the lib is missing, so they only need an optional dependency. I would be maintaining split -pulse packages where needed.