[arch-general] Pulseaudio

[Peter Lewis]

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.