[arch-general] Pulseaudio

[Philipp Überbacher]

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).