[arch-general] Pulseaudio
On a more serious mode now: As the devs themselves said, pulseaudio is optional, unless you are using GNOME, which requires Pulseaudio upstream. There is nothing clearer than that. Go blame GNOME developers. There is something i noticed. Morgan Gandwere is a Debian convert... That explains a lot of things actually. Debian is known to modify every possible package, since Debian maintainers are more wise and of course they know better than upstream developers about upstream software. Debian is known to fork a package when some upstream developer does not accept a debian maintainer's POS patch. Then the package is left to rott and die, since the debian maintainer is not able to develop it. Debian users are used to this mentality. That explains why someone with this background believes that a distribution should modify upstream to fit its maintainers whims. Sometimes there have been packages i wanted that didn't make part of Arch, even though in my opinion they should. For example, libxft-lcd was in community, while lib32-libxft-lcd was not. I asked in the forum to include that too, but instead, libxft-lcd went to AUR also. I didn't bitch about it, i just use AUR and that's it. One can't expect a whole distribution to accomondate his personal needs. So pulseaudio haters, since pulseaudio is optional, the only reason you complain is that you don't want it in extra, you don't want to install libpulse since you cant afford 1MB disk space, and you also don't want media packages compiled with pulse support because of a purely theoritical bloat. Well, you can't expect the distro to remain behind the times and not include proper (optional) pulse support for these reasons. If 1 mb of disk space and tiny bits of memory bloat in executables is such a waste for you, you could recompile those packages, or even better, try Gentoo. I hear Gentoo is really fast and without bloat. After 60 hours of compiling your apps start 5ns faster. Great!
Excerpts from christos.kotsaris's message of 2010-11-29 08:05:40 +0100:
On a more serious mode now:
As the devs themselves said, pulseaudio is optional, unless you are using GNOME, which requires Pulseaudio upstream. There is nothing clearer than that. Go blame GNOME developers.
There is something i noticed. Morgan Gandwere is a Debian convert... That explains a lot of things actually.
Debian is known to modify every possible package, since Debian maintainers are more wise and of course they know better than upstream developers about upstream software.
Debian is known to fork a package when some upstream developer does not accept a debian maintainer's POS patch. Then the package is left to rott and die, since the debian maintainer is not able to develop it.
Debian users are used to this mentality. That explains why someone with this background believes that a distribution should modify upstream to fit its maintainers whims.
Sometimes there have been packages i wanted that didn't make part of Arch, even though in my opinion they should. For example, libxft-lcd was in community, while lib32-libxft-lcd was not. I asked in the forum to include that too, but instead, libxft-lcd went to AUR also. I didn't bitch about it, i just use AUR and that's it. One can't expect a whole distribution to accomondate his personal needs.
So pulseaudio haters, since pulseaudio is optional, the only reason you complain is that you don't want it in extra, you don't want to install libpulse since you cant afford 1MB disk space, and you also don't want media packages compiled with pulse support because of a purely theoritical bloat.
Well, you can't expect the distro to remain behind the times and not include proper (optional) pulse support for these reasons. If 1 mb of disk space and tiny bits of memory bloat in executables is such a waste for you, you could recompile those packages, or even better, try Gentoo. I hear Gentoo is really fast and without bloat. After 60 hours of compiling your apps start 5ns faster. Great!
I guess I am one of those pulse-haters. I don't care whether it's in [extra], some other official repo or not since I simply don't need it. But now mplayer pulls in libpulse, and I have no idea which consequences this could have. I don't see why I need to have libs for a soundserver that I have no use for floating around on my machine. It is at best unnecessary and does nothing, at worst.. I don't know. I hope I don't need to install GNOME to turn it off or something.. (gconf and stuff).
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:09 +0100, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
I guess I am one of those pulse-haters. I don't care whether it's in [extra], some other official repo or not since I simply don't need it. But now mplayer pulls in libpulse, and I have no idea which consequences this could have. I don't see why I need to have libs for a soundserver that I have no use for floating around on my machine. It is at best unnecessary and does nothing, at worst.. I don't know. I hope I don't need to install GNOME to turn it off or something.. (gconf and stuff).
Sorry, but this is plain. When GNOME switched to pulse, we made the choice to boycot it and patch our applications to use GStreamer instead. We still do that with our GNOME packages, as we still don't want to force pulseaudio on systems. The reason for libpulse is that without pulseaudio installed, it will not have any function besides offering optional support for pulseaudio. No pulseaudio with libpulse just means no pulseaudio. We are the first binary distribution that offers you the complete choice of pulse or not. There's not any binary distribution out there that dares to implement pulseaudio this way. Either they force it up your ass completely, which is the way upstream wants, or the don't support it at all, which we used to do before. If you don't want that tiny lib on your system, be my guest, recompile all your mediaplayers to get rid of all those optional codecs for media you don't use. Those are useless libs too, but somehow nobody complains about that.
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:21 +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:09 +0100, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
I guess I am one of those pulse-haters. I don't care whether it's in [extra], some other official repo or not since I simply don't need it. But now mplayer pulls in libpulse, and I have no idea which consequences this could have. I don't see why I need to have libs for a soundserver that I have no use for floating around on my machine. It is at best unnecessary and does nothing, at worst.. I don't know. I hope I don't need to install GNOME to turn it off or something.. (gconf and stuff).
Sorry, but this is plain. When GNOME switched to pulse, we made the choice to boycot it and patch our applications to use GStreamer instead. We still do that with our GNOME packages, as we still don't want to force pulseaudio on systems. The reason for libpulse is that without pulseaudio installed, it will not have any function besides offering optional support for pulseaudio. No pulseaudio with libpulse just means no pulseaudio. We are the first binary distribution that offers you the complete choice of pulse or not. There's not any binary distribution out there that dares to implement pulseaudio this way. Either they force it up your ass completely, which is the way upstream wants, or the don't support it at all, which we used to do before.
If you don't want that tiny lib on your system, be my guest, recompile all your mediaplayers to get rid of all those optional codecs for media you don't use. Those are useless libs too, but somehow nobody complains about that.
Good luck getting pulse-haters to understand that a 1.14 MB package isn't going to kill their system though. Thanks JGC for your work on this. I didn't think it was possible to have such choice, and it looks like you've jumped through quite a few packaging hoops to get here.
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 17:25 +0800, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:
Good luck getting pulse-haters to understand that a 1.14 MB package isn't going to kill their system though.
Thanks JGC for your work on this. I didn't think it was possible to have such choice, and it looks like you've jumped through quite a few packaging hoops to get here.
I haven't done anything in this, as I have always avoided pulse like the plague. It was Jan Steffens who did all the work. I brought him on the team to take over GNOME together with Ionut, so I can focus on Xorg with my limited time.
Excerpts from Jan de Groot's message of 2010-11-29 10:21:12 +0100:
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:09 +0100, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
I guess I am one of those pulse-haters. I don't care whether it's in [extra], some other official repo or not since I simply don't need it. But now mplayer pulls in libpulse, and I have no idea which consequences this could have. I don't see why I need to have libs for a soundserver that I have no use for floating around on my machine. It is at best unnecessary and does nothing, at worst.. I don't know. I hope I don't need to install GNOME to turn it off or something.. (gconf and stuff).
Sorry, but this is plain. When GNOME switched to pulse, we made the choice to boycot it and patch our applications to use GStreamer instead. We still do that with our GNOME packages, as we still don't want to force pulseaudio on systems. The reason for libpulse is that without pulseaudio installed, it will not have any function besides offering optional support for pulseaudio. No pulseaudio with libpulse just means no pulseaudio. We are the first binary distribution that offers you the complete choice of pulse or not. There's not any binary distribution out there that dares to implement pulseaudio this way. Either they force it up your ass completely, which is the way upstream wants, or the don't support it at all, which we used to do before.
Good if libpulse really does nothing, but I hope you see my point. Libpulse is the part of PA you need to install in order to avoid PA. In a way it's like a vaccine. It sounds like what you guys did is the best possible thing for us users, and I appreciate that, but it shouldn't be forced up our asses by upstream in the first place.
If you don't want that tiny lib on your system, be my guest, recompile all your mediaplayers to get rid of all those optional codecs for media you don't use. Those are useless libs too, but somehow nobody complains about that.
Codecs are at least potentially useful, but it's still a valid comparison. The only media player I know that handles this sanely is MOC. Say it's built with wavpack support it. If wavpack is installed you can load and play wavpack files just fine, if wavpack is missing at runtime you simply can't add wavpack files to the playlist or play ones that already are in the playlist. That's the way it should be IMHO, but it's rarely the case.
On Monday 29 November 2010 09:21:12 Jan de Groot wrote:
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:09 +0100, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
I guess I am one of those pulse-haters. I don't care whether it's in [extra], some other official repo or not since I simply don't need it. But now mplayer pulls in libpulse, and I have no idea which consequences this could have. I don't see why I need to have libs for a soundserver that I have no use for floating around on my machine. It is at best unnecessary and does nothing, at worst.. I don't know. I hope I don't need to install GNOME to turn it off or something.. (gconf and stuff).
We are the first binary distribution that offers you the complete choice of pulse or not. There's not any binary distribution out there that dares to implement pulseaudio this way. Either they force it up your ass completely, which is the way upstream wants, or the don't support it at all, which we used to do before.
Hear hear! And I for one am really grateful for the effort that's made this happen. Though the early part of this thread was the result of some sort of lack of understanding (on my part, at least, if not others too) I really think that, now this has been explained properly, this is a virtual non-issue.
If you don't want that tiny lib on your system, be my guest, recompile all your mediaplayers to get rid of all those optional codecs for media you don't use. Those are useless libs too, but somehow nobody complains about that.
(Unfortunately?), there are plenty of examples of this, like emacs always requiring gconf just in case you also have GNOME installed and ask emacs to use the GNOME font. But, there's always a tradeoff, and these things are not that big. And, in case anyone needed even extra flexibility that that which the dev's already try to provide (as in pulse's case), we have ABS and the AUR. Arch FTW! Pete.
On 29.11.2010 10:21, Jan de Groot wrote:
On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:09 +0100, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
I guess I am one of those pulse-haters. I don't care whether it's in [extra], some other official repo or not since I simply don't need it. But now mplayer pulls in libpulse, and I have no idea which consequences this could have. I don't see why I need to have libs for a soundserver that I have no use for floating around on my machine. It is at best unnecessary and does nothing, at worst.. I don't know. I hope I don't need to install GNOME to turn it off or something.. (gconf and stuff). [...] If you don't want that tiny lib on your system, be my guest, recompile all your mediaplayers to get rid of all those optional codecs for media you don't use. Those are useless libs too, but somehow nobody complains about that.
We should not forget to mention all this plagued ati and intel mplayer users, who are beeing forced to carry the burden of having libvdpau on their systems! Have not heard so much complaing about that so far ... Cheers, Ulf
participants (6)
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Jan de Groot
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Ng Oon-Ee
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Peter Lewis
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Philipp Überbacher
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Ulf Winkelvos
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