Bug#993389: libcanberra-pulse: Add pipewire-pulse as alternative dependency to pulseaudio

[Guy Rutenberg]

Package: libcanberra-pulse
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: guyrut...@gmail.com

Dear Maintainer,

libcanberra-pulse is the default backend for playing notification sounds in
GNOME. Currently it depends directly on pulseaudio. When one wants to
transition from pulseaudio to pipewire, this dependency makes it problematic to
completely remove pulseaudio. The solution is to add "pulseaudio | pipewire-
pulse" as the dependency instead of only pulseaudio.

See also https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=992686.

Thanks,
Guy

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_IL, LC_CTYPE=en_IL (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_IL:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages libcanberra-pulse depends on:
ii libc6 2.31-17
ii libcanberra0 0.30-7+b1
ii libpulse0 15.0+dfsg1-2
pn pulseaudio <none>

libcanberra-pulse recommends no packages.

[Patrice Duroux]

Hi,

Some «recent» package update broke libcanberra working nicely with the PipeWire
pulse server.
My system is having the following:

$ dpkg -l | egrep '(pulse|pipewire|canberra)'
ii gnome-session-canberra 0.30-7+b1 amd64 GNOME session log in and log out sound events
ii gstreamer1.0-pipewire:amd64 0.3.35-1 amd64 GStreamer 1.0 plugin for the PipeWire multimedia server
ii gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio:amd64 1.18.5-1 amd64 GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio (transitional package)
ii libcanberra-gstreamer:amd64 0.30-7+b1 amd64 GStreamer backend for libcanberra
ii libcanberra-gtk3-0:amd64 0.30-7+b1 amd64 GTK+ 3.0 helper for playing widget event sounds with libcanberra
ii libcanberra-gtk3-module:amd64 0.30-7+b1 amd64 translates GTK3 widgets signals to event sounds
ii libcanberra-pulse:amd64 0.30-7+b1 amd64 PulseAudio backend for libcanberra
ii libcanberra0:amd64 0.30-7+b1 amd64 simple abstract interface for playing event sounds
ii libpipewire-0.3-0:amd64 0.3.35-1 amd64 libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server
ii libpipewire-0.3-common 0.3.35-1 all libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server - common files
ii libpipewire-0.3-modules:amd64 0.3.35-1 amd64 libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server - modules
ii libpulse-mainloop-glib0:amd64 15.0+dfsg1-2 amd64 PulseAudio client libraries (glib support)
ii libpulse0:amd64 15.0+dfsg1-2 amd64 PulseAudio client libraries
ii libpulse0:i386 15.0+dfsg1-2 i386 PulseAudio client libraries
ii libpulsedsp:amd64 15.0+dfsg1-2 amd64 PulseAudio OSS pre-load library
ii pipewire:amd64 0.3.35-1 amd64 audio and video processing engine multimedia server
ii pipewire-bin 0.3.35-1 amd64 PipeWire multimedia server - programs
ii pipewire-media-session 0.3.35-1 amd64 PipeWire multimedia session manager
ii pipewire-pulse 0.3.35-1 amd64 PipeWire PulseAudio daemon
ii pulseaudio 15.0+dfsg1-2 amd64 PulseAudio sound server
ii pulseaudio-module-bluetooth 15.0+dfsg1-2 amd64 Bluetooth module for PulseAudio sound server
ii pulseaudio-utils 15.0+dfsg1-2 amd64 Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server

Simply running:

$ /usr/bin/canberra-gtk-play -f /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga

does not provide me any error nor sound.

Then (force) removing libcanberra-pulse gives me back again the sound output.
Note that I do not know in such case if the sound goes through gstreamer or
alsa. But even removing libcanberra-gstreamer package, I am still getting the
sound.

Moreover:
$ paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga
is working fine.

Conclusion:

Even if pipewire-pulse provides pulseaudio, not sure that verything will be fine
regarding libcanberra.
Otherwise everything is fine with pipewire-pulse.

Wishes,
Patrice