[arch-general] Pulseaudio

[Ng Oon-Ee]

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.