Pulseaudio dependency, if Debian can do it ...

[rosea grammostola]

On 06/25/2011 12:45 PM, Tony Atkinson wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-06-25 at 12:21 +0200, rosea.grammostola wrote:
>> Ah I like constructive replies.
>>
>> I should provide you a little background info maybe. Since years
>> 64Studio is the most known company when it comes to the delivering of
>> (community) distros (and OEM products) optimized for multimedia and
>> especially proaudio. First they based there (OEM) products on Debian.
>> But because Ubuntu had those LTS releases, they switched to Ubuntu
>> instead. They offered the community the 64studio distro, but also made
>> products like Indamixx http://www.indamixx.com/
>>
>> But because of problems with Ubuntu they got back to Debian recently,
>> for building the OpenDAW distro, an optimized community distro for music
>> production and sound engineering. One of the reasons for this recent
>> change was the fact that you can't cleanly remove Pulseaudio from
>> Ubuntu. Not only 64Studio suffers from this, but also more small
>> projects like Tango Studio.
> I don't really understand this need to "remove pulseaudio"
> Why remove it?
>
> I'm by no means an expert, but have dabbled with the various audio
> production tailored distros, and it seems very possible to use such
> systems with Jack as a primary sound server and Pulse feeding into Jack
> when needed
>
> KXStudio (which I've used a fair bit), uses Jack2 for it's main sound
> server for the low latency audio apps, and provides Pulseaudio for other
> "traditional desktop" apps
>
> You can simply use the Jack2 GUI tools to "wire up" the different apps.
> Prof. audio apps going directly to Jack2
> others (Adobe Flash, for example) going through pulseaudio
> Pulseaudio feeding into Jack2
>
> I think your issues stem from this (possibly misguided, but as I said,
> I'm no expert) belief that you need to remove pulseaudio
>
I know KXStudio and I wouldn't call it an ideal system for professional 
music production / audio engineering (which doesn't say I couldn't serve 
some people for that). I don't think the discussion is whether or not is 
it possible to disable pulseaudio. There are many ways to handle this 
situation, disabling, routing pulse into JACK etc.. But the question is 
whether these ways serve experienced / professional music producers / 
audio engineers in an optimal way. You have to accept from me that a 
group of audio engineers wants to remove pulseaudio totally, as a matter 
of fact.

The discussion should be a different one in my opinion.
Why is it possible on Fedora and Debian etc. to remove Pulseaudio and 
why not on Ubuntu. How could we fix this.

Best regards,
\r