Pulseaudio dependency, if Debian can do it ...

[David Henningsson]

On 2011-06-27 13:44, rosea grammostola wrote:
> On 06/27/2011 12:44 PM, David Henningsson wrote:
>> On 2011-06-26 10:04, rosea grammostola wrote:
>>> "In Fedora pulseaudio is pulled in as a dependency of gnome-shell.
>>
>> ...and in Ubuntu it's a dependency on ubuntu-desktop, so no difference
>> there.
>
> There might be a small difference, but it isn't the same... Gnome-shell
> is some kind of an application, ubuntu-desktop is an metapackage. This
> looks surely like a design difference to me.

In practice there isn't, because should ubuntu-desktop not depend on 
pulseaudio,  ubuntu-desktop would still depend on gnome-volume-control 
(or gnome-control-center) which would depend on pulseaudio.

>>> By default pulseaudio hands over control to jack via D-bus.
>>
>> AFAIK this works equally well in both distros.
> Could be, but till now Fedora seems do it always a bit better then
> Ubuntu in this area (maybe because the Pulseaudio and JACK dev are using
> Fedora?).

Would it be possible for you to actually research this issue and point 
to the actual difference?

>> Making pulseaudio easier to remove is not a priority, but if any
>> volunteer wants to work with that functionality (and it doesn't end up
>> breaking something else), I don't see why we wouldn't take such a patch.
>>
>> For me the priority would be rather to fix the issues people have with
>> PulseAudio, rather than making it easier to remove. Audio drivers as
>> well as PulseAudio have improved over the last three years it's been a
>> part of Ubuntu, maybe it's worth another try?
>>
> It's true that PulseAudio has been improved, (all though when having
> pulseaudio installed, the often recommended proaudio soundcards from
> M-audio (Delta series) doesn't work OOTB)

Ok, let's take M-audio, I'm assuming you mean bug 178442. It was 
fixed/improved in Ubuntu 11.04, with a patch to alsa-lib. They still 
have non-standard mixer control names, which is a driver issue.

> and they will be working
> further to improve the coexistence of both PulseAudio and JACK. But no
> matter how well PulseAudio works, there will always be people who prefer
> to have it not on their system. So it would be good if you could remove
> it easily (like is possible on Debian and Fedora atm).

Sure; but for most of the those people stopping PulseAudio will be 
enough to keep it out of the way (in terms of CPU usage and sound card 
access things), and that is already possible.

Again, can you please research what happens if you remove PulseAudio on 
Debian and Fedora, and what way resulting user experience will differ 
from Ubuntu?

> Also looking at the waste of system resources Unity suffers with, it
> might be wiser for 'us' proaudio engineers / music producers to look for
> something else, Xfce maybe...

Just a wild guess, but maybe Unity 2D could be sufficient for these 
purposes?

-- 
David Henningsson
http://launchpad.net/~diwic