[arch-general] Pulseaudio

[Jan de Groot]

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.