Bug#1049418: xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin: Please loosen Recommends, and allow pipewire-pulse as an alternative to pulseaudio

[Arnaud Rebillout]

Source: xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
Version: 0.4.7-1
Severity: normal
User: de...@kali.org
Usertags: origin-kali

Dear Maintainer,

it would be nice if xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin would Recommend
'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' instead of simply 'pulseaudio'.

For background: in Kali Linux (a derivative based on Debian testing), we
switched from pulseaudio to pipewire in our flagship desktop XFCE, that
was back in May 2023 [1]. So far so good: sound works great, via the
compat daemon pipewire-pulse. I'm not claiming *everything* works 100%
(I just don't know), but it seems that it works well enough, based on
the feedback we had so far on our bug tracker.

XUbuntu (XFCE's flavor of Ubuntu) also switched to pipewire in version
23.04, back in Apr 2023 [2].

A minor issue, in Kali, is that we still have to install pulseaudio, due
to the fact that xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin depends on pulseaudio. So
pulseaudio must be installed, even though it's not running.

On the same line, we also can't install the metapackage pipewire-audio,
since it Conflicts with pulseaudio, hence breaks the xfce4 metapackage.

Changing the Recommends field of xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin to
'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' would solve those two issues, and more
generally it would make life easier for people who want to switch to
pipewire and remove pulseaudio.

Thanks for considering this change,

Arnaud

[1] https://www.kali.org/blog/kali-linux-2023-2-release/#xfce--pipewire
[2] https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-23-04-released/

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

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On Tue, 2023-08-15 at 20:09 +0700, Arnaud Rebillout wrote:
> Changing the Recommends field of xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin to
> 'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' would solve those two issues, and more
> generally it would make life easier for people who want to switch to
> pipewire and remove pulseaudio.

Hi Arnaud,

I have no idea what pipewire is, could you explain a bit here what it is? Is
it a drop-in for pulseaudio or something? Because xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin is
(by definition) really linked to pulseaudio.

And if we have a drop-in replacement, does it really make sense to have every
pulseaudio depending package to use alternate dependencies? Isn't there a way
to centralize this change?

Regards,
- --
Yves-Alexis
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[Yves-Alexis Perez]

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On Fri, 2023-09-08 at 10:53 +0700, Arnaud Rebillout wrote:
> Hope that it answers all your questions!

Hi Arnaud, thanks for the very detailed information, that's much helpful. And
it does make sense to use alternate dependencies indeed.

But here there might be some differences. In your initial mail you say:

> A minor issue, in Kali, is that we still have to install pulseaudio, due
> to the fact that xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin depends on pulseaudio. So
> pulseaudio must be installed, even though it's not running.
>
> On the same line, we also can't install the metapackage pipewire-audio,
> since it Conflicts with pulseaudio, hence breaks the xfce4 metapackage.
>
> Changing the Recommends field of xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin to
> 'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' would solve those two issues, and more
> generally it would make life easier for people who want to switch to
> pipewire and remove pulseaudio.

I don't think that's completely true. Recommends: can (and are, on Debian at
least) installed by default (when doing apt install or apt-get install) but
you can totally remove it afterwards.

So I guess the only relevant use case is when a user
- - has pipewire-pulse installed
- - has *not* pulseaudio installed
- - runs apt install xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin (or xfce4-plugins)

In that case, with the alternate recommends I'd assume it would consider the
recommends already satisfied and won't try to install pulseaudio.

I don't think that's really what Kali is concerned about, but rather the
default installation. I'm not sure how Kali does it but afair on Debian the
initial installation (using d-i but also I think when using debootstrap or
other tools) doesn't install recommends by default (because it still uses
tasksel).

In any case, the recommends shouldn't hurt us so I'll add it at some point.

Regards,
- --
Yves-Alexis
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