On 04/18/2013 03:32 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

[snip]

> So, I grasped the nettle, put in a negative pulseaudio use flag, unmerged
> pa and alsa-plugins, then rebuilt the 14 packages which needed it.
> 
> Surprisingly, everything still works.  I now get those last seconds from
> my news streams.  :-)
> 
> So, yes, I can recomment the removal of pulseaudio, unless anybody's got
> some particular need for it.

IME, there is one application that all but forces the use of PulseAudio:
Flash. Once Flash grabs onto an ALSA device, it doesn't let go, so you
*must* route it through PA if you would like to reliably use it with
anything else.

My particular discovery was that if I launched WoW under WINE, and then
launched a browser, audio in WoW worked fine. If I launched the browser
first (which resulted in a flash applet being loaded in GMail for the
purpose of audio notifications for google talk), Flash grabbed the ALSA
device and no WINE application could get at it. Routing both through
PulseAudio solved the problem.

The other reason I still use PA is X11...I like to use uxterm
extensively within X, and the only way to get the X11 bell working
appears to be via PA. So that's what I do. (Googling the history of that
bit of functionality was infuriating; that was the first time Lennart
pissed me off. Before someone finally acquiesced and added the
functionality to PA, he fought it, saying it wasn't PA's job.)