Bug#1029377: pipewire-pulse: Please remove Recommends: pipewire-alsa

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Package: pipewire-pulse
Version: 0.3.64-2
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: eeick...@ubuntu.com

Hello there,

The introduction of the "Recommends: pipewire-alsa" line in the debian/control
file has reintroduced the problem resolved by bug #1020903 in which pipewire-
pulse is causing a conflict with pulseaudio, albiet indirectly this time.

As pipewire-pulse is now soft-depending on pipewire-alsa, which does directly
conflict with pulseaudio. This is causing a package conflict, especialy when
seeded, when pulseaudio is installed and is causing the Ubuntu Studio seed to
fail to build.

Ubuntu Studio was intending to include, in their built-in-house Studio Controls
utility, a way to easily switch between the traditional Pulseaudio/JACK setup
and the Pipewire setup. Unfortunately, this recommends line, however well-
intentioned, completely broke that.

My recommendation is to demote pulseaudio-alsa to a Suggests in this case.

I hope that this is received well and that this functionality of switching
between the two may be, once again, restored.

Thanks,
Erich Eickmeyer
Ubuntu Studio Project Leader
Ubuntu MOTU


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
APT prefers lunar
APT policy: (500, 'lunar')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.19.0-1012-lowlatency (SMP w/12 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages pipewire-pulse depends on:
ii init-system-helpers 1.65.2
ii pipewire 0.3.64-2

Versions of packages pipewire-pulse recommends:
pn pipewire-alsa <none>

Versions of packages pipewire-pulse suggests:
ii libspa-0.2-bluetooth 0.3.64-2
ii pulseaudio-utils 1:16.1+dfsg1-1ubuntu3

-- no debconf information

[Dylan Aïssi]

Hello Erich,

Le dim. 22 janv. 2023 à 00:45, Erich Eickmeyer <eeick...@ubuntu.com> a écrit :
>
> The introduction of the "Recommends: pipewire-alsa" line in the debian/control
> file has reintroduced the problem resolved by bug #1020903 in which pipewire-
> pulse is causing a conflict with pulseaudio, albiet indirectly this time.
>
> As pipewire-pulse is now soft-depending on pipewire-alsa, which does directly
> conflict with pulseaudio. This is causing a package conflict, especialy when
> seeded, when pulseaudio is installed and is causing the Ubuntu Studio seed to
> fail to build.
>
> Ubuntu Studio was intending to include, in their built-in-house Studio Controls
> utility, a way to easily switch between the traditional Pulseaudio/JACK setup
> and the Pipewire setup. Unfortunately, this recommends line, however well-
> intentioned, completely broke that.
>
> My recommendation is to demote pulseaudio-alsa to a Suggests in this case.
>

I removed pipewire-alsa from depends field of pipewire-pulse. Instead, I created
a new metapackage pipewire-audio that depends on a set of pipewire packages
recommended for a standard audio use of pipewire. A large part of bug reports
against pipewire and wireplumber are mainly from users with broken
config because
they don't follow/install recommended packages. I guess this new package should
make that clearer.

I agree that pulseaudio and pipewire-pulse can be installed together
at same time,
but for whatever reasons several users have reported conflicts between them. And
it seems easier (at least for standard users of pipewire for audio) to
add a conflict
between them, but I guess users of Ubuntu Studio don't have a standard use of
pipewire. This brings me to the question, why do you want both pulseaudio and
pipewire-pulse to be co-installable?

Best regards,
Dylan

[eeick...@ubuntu.com]

Hi Dylan,

We're planning on having pipewire with pipewire-jack as the default
configuration, but switchable via the enabling/disabling of services
using our built-in-house (but available to all distros) Studio Controls
utility (https://github.com/ovenwerks/studio-controls). The reason for
this is that there's currently no feasible way to bridge JACK to
pipewire, so having the "old school" pulseaudio setup and
starting/stopping JACK on demand as we've done in the past so that
workflows aren't broken and that professional audio users can still get
work done the way they always have.

Unfortunately, the pipewire-jack configuration isn't quite ready for
professional audio, but will work for most users, which is why we need
this particular configuration. Additionally, some Firewire audio aren't
supported under ALSA and require a completely different backend
(FFADO), and pipewire lacks the facility to support those interfaces.

So, as you can see, there's multiple reasons why we'd want to keep both
pipewire and pulseaudio installed simultaneously.

--