FS#41796 - [gnome-settings-daemon] should depend on libpulse instead of pulseaudio

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Joonas Henriksson (ooo) - Wednesday, 03 September 2014, 03:58 GMT
Last edited by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Thursday, 11 September 2014, 11:04 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Jan de Groot (JGC)
Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Description:

gnome-settings-daemon-3.12* doesn't require pulseaudio to run or build, and libpulse should be enough.
therefore hard dependency on pulseaudio should be removed, and libpulse added as dependency for the package.

I've checked that GSD builds without pulseaudio, the configure script only checks for libpulse, and there's no '--disable-pulse' option any more.

This would be great for gnome shell users who wish to run it without pulseaudio, as GSD seems to be only gnome component still requiring it.

Also, it would probably be a good idea to add pulseaudio as optional dependency to enable volume control for either gnome-settings-daemon or gnome-shell. The latter would make more sense to me, but I haven't checked whether the volume control works without gnome-settings-daemon installed.


Additional info:
* package version: 3.12.2-1
This task depends upon

Closed by  Jan de Groot (JGC)
Thursday, 11 September 2014, 11:04 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Additional comments about closing:  Mediakeys won't work without pulseaudio.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Wednesday, 03 September 2014, 14:45 GMT
Gnome needs pulseaudio for volume control. Making it optional means breaking down basic functionality of gnome, so I won't make this optional.
Comment by Joonas Henriksson (ooo) - Thursday, 04 September 2014, 00:31 GMT
Thanks for your comment. I see your point, removing pulseaudio breaks some gnome functionality (that can be fixed with extensions to work with plain ALSA). Therefore having pulseaudio pulled in as a dependency when you install the complete gnome desktop makes sense, as you'd expect all the functionality to be there.

However there are people who have issues with pulseaudio or simply don't need/want/like it, so it would be great if you could install minimal gnome environment without it. Maybe I should have opened more generic bug report for that, but since you can already install gnome without a lot of basic functionality (e.g. without networkmanager, evolution), I thought this was just something you had missed :)

At the moment you can already install plain gnome-shell without pulseaudio (which means broken volume controls), and it only gets pulled in if you install gnome-settings-daemon, which would be enough for fully functional desktop environment. Since GSD doesn't require PA any more, pulseaudio-free gnome environment could be easily achieved with some dependency changes.

As said, I agree that pulling pulseaudio makes sense when installing the whole gnome group for example, but I believe that the possibility to use gnome without pulseaudio would be beneficial for many users including myself.
Maybe there could be some better solution, like adding pulseaudio to 'gnome' group.

Anyway I hope you'd still consider changing the dependency for gnome-settings-daemon.

thanks :)

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