On Sun, Mar 1, 2026 at 4:17 PM Sam James <[email protected]> wrote: > Roman Žilka <[email protected]> writes: > > On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 2:11 AM Sam James <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Roman Žilka <[email protected]> writes: > >> > Pulseaudio, which > >> > serves a similar purpose, already has a global flag and making > >> > "pipewire" global as well would put it on equal footing. Moreover, the > >> > flag's position in use.desc will put the the option to get rid of the > >> > obnoxious daemon and its ecosystem on full display for those who see > >> > no point in pipewire (incl. myself). It's often on by default *sigh*. > >> > >> I don't think this rant is appropriate (or useful) for the discussion. > > > > This is actually the primary reason for this proposal. I didn't open > > it just because the flag represents a well-defined function, but > > because I think it'll be useful for a lot of people. PA/PW are > > omnipresent for some reason, but unnecessary for a majority of audio > > use cases (having audio output and input, mixing of multiple sources, > > This is a distinct topic and was covered already with the PipeWire + > PulseAudio default change a little while ago, though.
I think that was a bad change and the three bugs that it was based on lead me to think that you didn't give much thought to how dispensable PA/PW is. In the wild of the internet, people deal with PA/PW time and again as if they equaled audio in Linux. In Fedora and Ubuntu they kind of do, but that's just because they lack USE flags and have to make packages with everything compiled in for the sake of every last use case. But if there's a global flag or flags for all things PA and PW (possibly minus rarely installed things like some games), I'll be satisfied. > > volume control, per-app volume control, output to any physical output, > > ...) and, of course, video use cases (very few people screencast > > outside of videoconferencing, which doesn't need PW). > > This is covered in the news item that Paul referred to, but no, it's > used on Wayland DEs to show previews of windows as well, for example. That's a poor reason for a whole new service in the system. > > By the way, there are these in use.desc now: > > pulseaudio - Add sound server support via media-libs/libpulse (may be > > PulseAudio or PipeWire) > > screencast - Enable support for remote desktop and screen cast using > > PipeWire > > > > I didn't investigate why the listed packages had USE=pipewire while > > these existed, but it's something to consider. Checked > > media-libs/libpulse briefly: its homepage is > > www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio, but I can't find a > > single mention of PW there. > > > > That's the most important part! As I said, USE=pipewire is *usually* > (but not always, and should be fixed where it isn't) for using the > native API which very few things indeed use. Well, it seems that what's actually required is to review every package with the USE "pipewire" to see if that shouldn't be renamed to "screencast" or "pulseaudio". "pulseaudio" meaning the universal API, so it can really be PA or PW. Then, it'll be possible to decide what to do with what's left with "pipewire": make a global "pipewire" (with the meaning "PipeWire native API", if I understand it right), do nothing, or something else yet (like individual renaming of "pipewire" to something more specific). -Roman
