[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#853084: Solution

[Adam Borowski]

Control: reassign -1 xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin

On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 11:33:18AM -0600, Michael Lustfield wrote:
> > I noticed now that I have to install pulseaudio first. After I did this
> > the plugin works.
> >
> > Should pulseaudio be installed by default?
>
> After seeing the resolution, I would say the solution should be adding
> pulseaudio to either recommends (most likely) or to depends of the plugin.

Not a good idea for a plugin that's hard-Depended on by a major desktop.

PulseAudio is not always good because of its bugs and breaking the needs of
some users.

For example, I'd _want_ to use PulseAudio: I'd like convenient switching
between speakers and headphones, and none of its usual downsides affect me:
I don't play twitch games so latency isn't bad, not on a laptop so wasting
7% of a core and associated wakeups just bump my electricity bill instead of
reducing battery duration, I don't do high-quality audio processing, etc.

But, it has at least two show-stopper bugs:
* constant noise even when not playing a sound; very quiet but audible
  enough to be infuriating
* suspend makes all sound high-pitched and choppy, until killing+restarting
  PA.  Upstream's response: "your sound card doesn't support suspend".
  Except, that happens with PA when no sound was being played, while ALSA
  works perfectly even when suspending during play.

So no, sorry.  No hard dependency on PulseAudio, please, it's not yet ready
for that.  Even Recommends would be too much, it's not up to a desktop
environment to switch unrelated system components.

On the other hand, it's debatable which relation (xfce4->plugin or
plugin->pulseaudio) should be low; I'd vote for the current state, though
-- it's more discoverable by users, at the cost of a tiny amount of disk
space.


Meow!
-- 
Autotools hint: to do a zx-spectrum build on a pdp11 host, type:
  ./configure --host=zx-spectrum --build=pdp11