Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

["Canek Peláez Valdés" <caneko@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:29 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
[snip]
> Somebody reported that pulseaudio is an absolute requirement for Gnome
>>=3.8.  That may not be 100% of users, but the "forced" is certainly
> there.

No one is forcing nothing on anyone, since nobody is forcing no one to
use GNOME, Gentoo, or Linux for that matter. The developers of any
project can always decide the dependencies of a project. If you are
not a developer, you simply have no vote in the matter, although you
certainly always have voice... that they can choose to ignore.

> There's a difference between a "default choice" and an absolute
> requirement.

Yeah; and the decision is for the developers to make.

>> Basically there's a bunch of vague criticisms of unnamed systems where
>> "they" force stuff on "all users" for "no good reason". Nevermind that
>> we can actually state what the reasons are. Fingers in the ears.
>> neener neener.
>
> Please feel free to state those reasons, which as far as I can see,
> nobody has done yet in this thread; "they" being the gnome team, and the
> reasons being for the forcing, not for a non-existent "default choice".

If GNOME has to support PA and non-pa systems, they need to code,
test, support and bug-fix 2 different sets of of systems. If they need
to support ConsoleKit and logind, the number grows to 4 (PA/ck,
PA/logind, non-PA/ck, non-PA/logind). With 3 different optional
requirements, it's 8 sets of systems. With 4, is 16. With n, it's 2^n.

That's exponential growth, which in CS is always no-no.

Who is going to code, test, support and bug fix all those possible
configurations? You?

The GNOME developers simply cannot support all different sets of
possible configurations, and PA covers the sound needs of *ALL* users
(doesn't matter if you like it or not), even the simple cases. If PA
has bugs in some configuration, those bugs need to be fixed; the
solution (in the GNOME developers view) is not to "remove PA", since
the goal of the project is to cover *ALL* use cases.

But hey, the source is there; feel free to patch whatever needs to be
patched in GNOME (and probably GStreamer) so it doesn't require PA.
Just be certain that those patches will be rejected by upstream, for
the reasons stated above.

And by the way, this is also true for Gentoo: it cannot support all
different sets of possible configurations, no matter how hard they/we
try.

Regards.
--
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México