Sebastien can correct me if I'm wrong or out of line, but I don't think
the problem is that anyone is against having a check-box to switch off
pulse audio. The problem is that pulseaudio was developed or added in a
way that makes the actual work of enabling and disabling it a lot more
complicated than flipping a switch. Right now it actually involves
removing packages and perhaps build new ones that can be installed to
replace some of the removed ones. Looking at just the dependants of the
pulseaudio package shows that you'll need new non-pulseaudio dependent
versions of things like openjdk-6-jre (aka java) and even ubuntu-
desktop. On top of that you may need the dependents of openjdk-6-jre to
be modified to work with the non-pulseaudio dependent openjdk-6-jre.
It would be nice if a set of packages could be built to support running
with or without pulseaudio. It sounds like that is not a priority for
Ubuntu's developers. Maybe they would be willing to accept them if the
community provided it. At the very least it could live out in universe.
(I'm not sure if that's the right term for it.) Frankly, I've got the
impression that the way that Gnome or Pulseaudio are being developed
makes this more and more difficult, but I'm not sure about that.
Basically it sounds like making pulseaudio work for those users/hardware
for whom it can work requires a setup that completely breaks sound for
users/hardware for whom pulseaudio cannot or will not support. 'The
Perfect Pulse Audio Installation' provided by the pulseaudio developers
does not allow for a user to turn off pulseaudio. You could run
pasuspender but it will kill sound for everything that's been forced to
only support pulseaudio to work in 'The Perfect Pulse Audio
Installation'.
Related to a question I had on launch pad, I have started to investigate
what packages would need non-pulseaudio dependent versions to allow a
working system without pulseaudio enabled. I haven't pursued it much
yet because I'm not sure if the work will be welcomed by the devs or
not. Also any code contributions coming from me right now would have to
be considered legally encumbered. I can try to address that, but it has
the potential to cause me difficulties that I'm not will to risk unless
I know I won't be fighting against the Ubuntu devs. If the work is sure
to be rejected, I have other things to do. Swimming against the stream
is not a hobby of mine.
At a high level, I think the plan should be something like:
1. List dependants.
Build a tree of packages dependent on the pulseaudio related packages.
(dependants, dependants of dependants, etc) We can use the dependants field in
the deb files. It may not be right in all cases, but it's a start.
2. Drop pulseaudio dependant features and related packages.
Determine which of the dependant packages are just not needed if you are
not running pulseaudio. Pulseaudio is required for various sound related
feature that are 'bells & whistles' like bluetooth support. With pulseaudio
removed those features and the packages that implement them simply cannot work.
- Are there any packages that must be removed if pulseaudio is
to be disabled.
- If so could they be changed to not need to be removed? I
think the check-box solution gets more difficult as the list of packages
that is required to be removed when the check-box toggles grows. We
should make the list of packages that need to be removed because
pulseaudio is enable or disabled as small as possible.
3. Fix remaining dependants.
For each package that should be able to work without pulseaudio we need
to determine:
- Can the existing package work without pulseaudio?
- If so, would we be allowed to remove the dependency in the
deb file and put pulseaudio/no-pulseaudio configuration under control of
the check-box.
- Otherwise I guess we build an otherwise identical package.
- Can the package be modified to work both with and without
pulseaudio based on the check-box?
- Do we put a separate hybrid package in universe (or
somewhere)?
- Can we replace the current pulseaudio-only package with
the hybrid?
- Is is not possible to make at hybrid package? We do not want any of
these, but reality will always win.
- These packages will need to be removed and replaced when the
check-box toggled. Yuck!
- Or we just don't support them.
- Or we just remove what we have to when toggling and
require the user to manually replace them using a cookbook.
- Since the desktop package will probably need to be changed,
we won't need to switch between pulseaudio-only packages and hybrid
packages when toggling the check-box.
Again, this is just a plan I'm concocting on my own. I am not a Ubuntu
dev. I don't even have a lot of experience with Ubuntu. To my
knowledge I have nobody's blessing. I'm just trying to put together a
workable plan to see if it looks like it might catch on. I don't really
have high hopes.
Edd
--
removing pulseaudio breaks sound control
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/440465
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