[arch-general] Is there a clean solution to get completely rid of Pulseaudio?

[Ralf Madorf]

On Fri, 2011-12-23 at 22:34 -0500, Brendan Long wrote:
> Is it really worth the effort to save 5 MB of disk space (while having
> random broken packages)?

When the packages pulseaudio and pulseaudio-alsa
(including /etc/asound.conf) are replaced by a dummy package no other
package would be broken.

Assumed the command pulseaudio --kill should work without failure, then
what would be the difference to not directly replacing the two packages
by a dummy package or perhaps two dummy packages?

IIUC https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD#provides ...
        
        "provides
        
        An array of package names that this package provides the
        features of (or a virtual package such as cron or sh). If you
        use this variable, you should add the version (pkgver and
        perhaps the pkgrel) that this package will provide if
        dependencies may be affected by it. For instance, if you are
        providing a modified qt package named qt-foobar version 3.3.8
        which provides qt then the provides array should look like
        provides=('qt=3.3.8'). Putting provides=('qt') will cause to
        fail those dependencies that require a specific version of qt.
        Do not add pkgname to your provides array, this is done
        automatically."

... instead of
        
        $ cat PKGBUILD
        pkgname=pulseaudio-dummy
        pkgver=1.0
        pkgrel=1
        pkgdesc="A dummy package that pretends to provide pulseaudio."
        arch=('any')
        url=""
        license=('BSD')
        provides=('pulseaudio')
        conflicts=('pulseaudio')
        source=()

... provides=('pulseaudio') better should be ('pulseaudio>=1.1-1') OTOH
I can imagine that ">" is an argument that isn't allowed?
And also it's ok to
provides=('pulseaudio
           pulseaudio-alsa')
?!

- Ralf

-- 
For Debian I replaced pulseaudio and libcanberra-pulse by dummy packages
and everything worked. I don't think that there was the need to replace
libcanberra-pulse OTOH it's also not needed.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2011/11/msg00852.html