[gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Gentoo.

I've just removed pulseaudio from my main Gentoo system.  Why?  Several
reasons:

(i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
between sound applications and the kernel.

(ii) I was having problems with the last 1-2 seconds being cut off audio
streams from news sites.

(iii) The provenance of the code; it's author is also udev's maintainer,
the udev that has given most of us so much fun over the months.  When
might awkwardnesses start appearing in pulseaudio?

By the way, I run sound stuff mainly in Gnome 2, using aqualung to play
CDs and listening to audio files streamed or downloaded from the net.

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.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1459 bytes --]

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.)


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1246 bytes --]

Am 18.04.2013 21:48, schrieb Michael Mol:
> 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.

/I can have as many flash instances as I want and still listen to stuff
being played in vlc. Without pulseaudio crap.

Maybe wine just sucks?/


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1772 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2114 bytes --]

On 04/18/2013 04:02 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> Am 18.04.2013 21:48, schrieb Michael Mol:
>> 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.
> 
> /I can have as many flash instances as I want and still listen to stuff
> being played in vlc. Without pulseaudio crap.
> 
> Maybe wine just sucks?/
> 

Easy on the invective. Did you pay attention to the specific sequence of
events I described? Or are you simply reporting that Flash works fine as
an ALSA client along other concurrently reporting tasks, with no
reference to the explicit order of the launch of things?

Incidentally, WoW+WINE worked absolutely fine with other ALSA clients.
It was only when Flash got added to the mix--and was launched
first--that I had a problem. Further, if Flash was launched before PA
(and ALSA apps weren't configured to route through PA's alsa wrapper),
PA itself could not latch on to the sound card.

Also, it's possible Adobe has since fixed the bug. This was a couple
years ago, even before they added direct PulseAudio support to flash.


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

Am 18.04.2013 22:13, schrieb Michael Mol:
> On 04/18/2013 04:02 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>> Am 18.04.2013 21:48, schrieb Michael Mol:
>>> 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.
>> /I can have as many flash instances as I want and still listen to stuff
>> being played in vlc. Without pulseaudio crap.
>>
>> Maybe wine just sucks?/
>>
> Easy on the invective. Did you pay attention to the specific sequence of
> events I described? Or are you simply reporting that Flash works fine as
> an ALSA client along other concurrently reporting tasks, with no
> reference to the explicit order of the launch of things?
>
> Incidentally, WoW+WINE worked absolutely fine with other ALSA clients.
> It was only when Flash got added to the mix--and was launched
> first--that I had a problem. Further, if Flash was launched before PA
> (and ALSA apps weren't configured to route through PA's alsa wrapper),
> PA itself could not latch on to the sound card.
>
> Also, it's possible Adobe has since fixed the bug. This was a couple
> years ago, even before they added direct PulseAudio support to flash.

the order is completely irrelavant. I start flash, xine, amarok, vlc,
alsaplayer, whatever - and it just works. Without pulseaudio, jackd,
esd, artsd etc pp.

I don't use wine. For a lot of good reasons.

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2087 bytes --]

On 04/18/2013 04:43 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> Am 18.04.2013 22:13, schrieb Michael Mol:
>> On 04/18/2013 04:02 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>>> Am 18.04.2013 21:48, schrieb Michael Mol:

[snip]

>>>> 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.
>>> /I can have as many flash instances as I want and still listen to stuff
>>> being played in vlc. Without pulseaudio crap.
>>>
>>> Maybe wine just sucks?/
>>>
>> Easy on the invective. Did you pay attention to the specific sequence of
>> events I described? Or are you simply reporting that Flash works fine as
>> an ALSA client along other concurrently reporting tasks, with no
>> reference to the explicit order of the launch of things?
>>
>> Incidentally, WoW+WINE worked absolutely fine with other ALSA clients.
>> It was only when Flash got added to the mix--and was launched
>> first--that I had a problem. Further, if Flash was launched before PA
>> (and ALSA apps weren't configured to route through PA's alsa wrapper),
>> PA itself could not latch on to the sound card.
>>
>> Also, it's possible Adobe has since fixed the bug. This was a couple
>> years ago, even before they added direct PulseAudio support to flash.
> 
> the order is completely irrelavant. I start flash, xine, amarok, vlc,
> alsaplayer, whatever - and it just works. Without pulseaudio, jackd,
> esd, artsd etc pp.

Do you say that because you've tested the various orders and know that
one application will not conflict with another if started before that,
or do you say that because you've never noticed a problem, despite not
knowing the order you've started things?

> 
> I don't use wine. For a lot of good reasons.
> 

Name one.


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

Am 18.04.2013 23:10, schrieb Michael Mol:
> On 04/18/2013 04:43 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>> Am 18.04.2013 22:13, schrieb Michael Mol:
>>> On 04/18/2013 04:02 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>>>> Am 18.04.2013 21:48, schrieb Michael Mol:
> [snip]
>
>>>>> 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.
>>>> /I can have as many flash instances as I want and still listen to stuff
>>>> being played in vlc. Without pulseaudio crap.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe wine just sucks?/
>>>>
>>> Easy on the invective. Did you pay attention to the specific sequence of
>>> events I described? Or are you simply reporting that Flash works fine as
>>> an ALSA client along other concurrently reporting tasks, with no
>>> reference to the explicit order of the launch of things?
>>>
>>> Incidentally, WoW+WINE worked absolutely fine with other ALSA clients.
>>> It was only when Flash got added to the mix--and was launched
>>> first--that I had a problem. Further, if Flash was launched before PA
>>> (and ALSA apps weren't configured to route through PA's alsa wrapper),
>>> PA itself could not latch on to the sound card.
>>>
>>> Also, it's possible Adobe has since fixed the bug. This was a couple
>>> years ago, even before they added direct PulseAudio support to flash.
>> the order is completely irrelavant. I start flash, xine, amarok, vlc,
>> alsaplayer, whatever - and it just works. Without pulseaudio, jackd,
>> esd, artsd etc pp.
> Do you say that because you've tested the various orders and know that
> one application will not conflict with another if started before that,
> or do you say that because you've never noticed a problem, despite not
> knowing the order you've started things?

because I am using linux since Suse 6.2. And in that time I have
listened to a lot of music, watched a lot of movies and did a lot of
things in parallel. Just yesterday I watched a music video on youtube,
while hunting for something sounding almost identical on my harddisk -
using vlc. So firefox&flash and vlc were working fine.

>
>> I don't use wine. For a lot of good reasons.
>>
> Name one.
>
fat, slow and buggy. Do you need more? If I really had an application
that I must use and is windows only - I would install windows. That is a
lot quicker and less painful than that wine crapfest shitting all over
the place.

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2821 bytes --]

On 04/18/2013 05:46 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> Am 18.04.2013 23:10, schrieb Michael Mol:

[snip]

>> Do you say that because you've tested the various orders and know
>> that one application will not conflict with another if started
>> before that, or do you say that because you've never noticed a
>> problem, despite not knowing the order you've started things?
> 
> because I am using linux since Suse 6.2. And in that time I have 
> listened to a lot of music, watched a lot of movies and did a lot of 
> things in parallel. Just yesterday I watched a music video on
> youtube, while hunting for something sounding almost identical on my
> harddisk - using vlc. So firefox&flash and vlc were working fine.

I know you're smarter than this. You actively ignored my explicit
description of a testable sequence of steps. Which Hartmut specifically
tried, and in doing so that the problem I encountered is not currently
present.

By ignoring the sequence of steps, you're left with, well, nothing
testable or verifiable.

> 
>> 
>>> I don't use wine. For a lot of good reasons.
>>> 
>> Name one.
>> 
> fat, slow and buggy. Do you need more?

Not from you, I suspect. At this point, I'm confident you have
absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

By "fat", I suppose you're referring to the number of additional
binaries that land on your system. If you're going to implement the
entire API of an operating system, even as a wrapper around native
libraries, you're going to have a lot of code. That's just the way it is.

As for "slow"...it's been documented from time to time that some
applications run *faster* via WINE than on Windows. On one occasion,
this was the result of the Linux drivers being faster than the Windows ones.

As for "buggy"...Sure, not all of the APIs are implemented. Not all of
them need to be. Bugfixes and such are prioritized by interest in the
applications which need the buggy APIs, which is why many applications
work fine. Heck, I have an application installed which *depends* on
WINE, and this is part of that application's "Linux" version. I use it
every day as part of my job, and so I can do my job from this laptop
running Gentoo instead of a machine running Windows.

> If I really had an application that I must use and is windows only -
> I would install windows. That is a lot quicker and less painful than
> that wine crapfest shitting all over the place.

...The worst I've had has been WINE apps getting registered to handle
some files. Unless you're referring to the idea that WINE was what was
breaking my sound (itself clearly erroneous if you had read through the
description of either my or Hartmut's steps), I really don't know what
you're talking about, and I fear I'm just feeding a troll.



[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

Am 19.04.2013 00:02, schrieb Michael Mol:
> On 04/18/2013 05:46 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>> Am 18.04.2013 23:10, schrieb Michael Mol:
> [snip]
>
>>> Do you say that because you've tested the various orders and know
>>> that one application will not conflict with another if started
>>> before that, or do you say that because you've never noticed a
>>> problem, despite not knowing the order you've started things?
>> because I am using linux since Suse 6.2. And in that time I have 
>> listened to a lot of music, watched a lot of movies and did a lot of 
>> things in parallel. Just yesterday I watched a music video on
>> youtube, while hunting for something sounding almost identical on my
>> harddisk - using vlc. So firefox&flash and vlc were working fine.
> I know you're smarter than this. You actively ignored my explicit
> description of a testable sequence of steps. Which Hartmut specifically
> tried, and in doing so that the problem I encountered is not currently
> present.
>
> By ignoring the sequence of steps, you're left with, well, nothing
> testable or verifiable.

I have answered your none-question. I am using a wide range of
applications (firefox&flash, chromium, vlc, mplayer, alsaplayer etc pp)
a lot of them at the same time, starting in different orders AND I NEVER
HAD A PROBLEM. It does not matter if flash starts first, then vlc then
alsaplayer then mplayer or chromium first, then xine then firefox. IT
JUST WORKS.

The only thing missing is wine. Hmm... maybe it IS wine? But why using a
broken-by-design sounddaemon to paper over wine bugs, if there are a
couple of easy ways to solve the problem once and for all? Without
introducing lag and additional bugs. ie - fix wine. Or don't use it in
the first place.

>>>> I don't use wine. For a lot of good reasons.
>>>>
>>> Name one.
>>>
>> fat, slow and buggy. Do you need more?
> Not from you, I suspect. At this point, I'm confident you have
> absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
>
> By "fat", I suppose you're referring to the number of additional
> binaries that land on your system. If you're going to implement the
> entire API of an operating system, even as a wrapper around native
> libraries, you're going to have a lot of code. That's just the way it is.

No, by fat I mean its absolute humongous size. The crap its vomits into
my $HOME adds just insult to injury.

>
> As for "slow"...it's been documented from time to time that some
> applications run *faster* via WINE than on Windows. On one occasion,
> this was the result of the Linux drivers being faster than the Windows ones.

well, from time to time I try wine with this and that app. Speed?
Abysmal - if the app works at all.

Btw, who is doing that 'documentation'? Phoronix?

>
> As for "buggy"...Sure, not all of the APIs are implemented. Not all of
> them need to be. Bugfixes and such are prioritized by interest in the
> applications which need the buggy APIs, which is why many applications
> work fine. Heck, I have an application installed which *depends* on
> WINE, and this is part of that application's "Linux" version. I use it
> every day as part of my job, and so I can do my job from this laptop
> running Gentoo instead of a machine running Windows.

great for you. AT WORK I just use the XP box to do windows jobs. At the
end it is so much easier.
>
>> If I really had an application that I must use and is windows only -
>> I would install windows. That is a lot quicker and less painful than
>> that wine crapfest shitting all over the place.
> ...The worst I've had has been WINE apps getting registered to handle
> some files. Unless you're referring to the idea that WINE was what was
> breaking my sound (itself clearly erroneous if you had read through the
> description of either my or Hartmut's steps), I really don't know what
> you're talking about, and I fear I'm just feeding a troll.

And I am afraid that you are just talking because you like the sound of
your voice. What was your point again?

Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> >> I don't use wine. For a lot of good reasons.
> >>  
> > Name one.
> >  
> fat, slow and buggy. Do you need more? If I really had an application
> that I must use and is windows only - I would install windows. That
> is a lot quicker and less painful than that wine crapfest shitting
> all over the place.

I agree with a lot of good reasons primarily around security but I have
to say I don't agree with this.

Wine is far faster that Virtualbox or rebooting.

Take adding bookmarks to pdfs which I sorted out yesterday. Install
foxit on windows copy the directory to wine (install failed for me) and
bang, sorted.

Perhaps the latest poppler and okular can do bookmarks properly now?
but there are other commercial apps required thankfully falling one by
one.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

[gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Hartmut Figge]

Michael Mol:

>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.

Mhm. I have now started my SM and loaded the flash
http://fun.from.hell.pl/2003-02-18/volare-karaoke.swf. Then i started
wine playing tcc1, a mod of Might & Magic 6. No problem with the sound.

Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202
wine-1.5.28

No pulseaudio. ;)

Hartmut

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 822 bytes --]

On 04/18/2013 05:26 PM, Hartmut Figge wrote:
> Michael Mol:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Mhm. I have now started my SM and loaded the flash
> http://fun.from.hell.pl/2003-02-18/volare-karaoke.swf. Then i started
> wine playing tcc1, a mod of Might & Magic 6. No problem with the sound.
> 
> Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202
> wine-1.5.28
> 
> No pulseaudio. ;)

Sounds like they got that problem fixed, then. That's good.



[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Stroller]

On 18 April 2013, at 20:32, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> ...
> (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
> it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
> between sound applications and the kernel.

If you don't understand the term "sound server" you probably shouldn't be using Gentoo. 

When I'm watching a YouTube video I still want to hear my email client go bing or my chat program alert me of my buddy coming online. 

That's not possible if my web-browser has a hard-wired path into my soundcard and ain't letting go.

Stroller.

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

'evening, Stroller.

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 09:02:36PM +0100, Stroller wrote:

> On 18 April 2013, at 20:32, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > ...
> > (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
> > it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
> > between sound applications and the kernel.

> If you don't understand the term "sound server" you probably shouldn't
> be using Gentoo. 

:-)

> When I'm watching a YouTube video I still want to hear my email client
> go bing or my chat program alert me of my buddy coming online. 

> That's not possible if my web-browser has a hard-wired path into my
> soundcard and ain't letting go.

Thanks for the explanation, I'm beginning to understand what "sound
server" means.  It's a sort of mixer, isn't it?

My email client (over an ssh session) goes bleep via my PC's internal
speaker, which I hear even when the other sound system is being used.

> Stroller.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

Am 18.04.2013 22:02, schrieb Stroller:
> On 18 April 2013, at 20:32, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> ...
>> (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
>> it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
>> between sound applications and the kernel.
> If you don't understand the term "sound server" you probably shouldn't be using Gentoo. 
>
> When I'm watching a YouTube video I still want to hear my email client go bing or my chat program alert me of my buddy coming online. 
>
> That's not possible if my web-browser has a hard-wired path into my soundcard and ain't letting go.
>
> Stroller.
>
>
>
beeep. Wrong.

Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> > ...
> > (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What
> > does it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary
> > layer of fat between sound applications and the kernel.  
> 
> If you don't understand the term "sound server" you probably
> shouldn't be using Gentoo. 
> 
> When I'm watching a YouTube video I still want to hear my email
> client go bing or my chat program alert me of my buddy coming online. 
> 
> That's not possible if my web-browser has a hard-wired path into my
> soundcard and ain't letting go.

Just throwing out there that users can or atleast could use alsa plugs
to have multiple applications. I did that before pulseaudio came along
to play nfs carbon under cedega and listen to music.

Also I have never got around to looking into Jackd but isn't it meant
to be by far the best. I know pro audio users use it and I have heard it
is not the easiest to set up but is there any reason why it isn't the
default setup.

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/JACK

From a quick look at this jack can hook up multiple applications that
seem to need to be set up individually. What's the scope for Jack

a./ replacing pulseaudio

b./ having a compat interface layer to make pulseaudio compatible apps
talk to jack

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2009 bytes --]

On 04/18/2013 05:28 PM, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
>>> ...
>>> (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What
>>> does it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary
>>> layer of fat between sound applications and the kernel.  
>>
>> If you don't understand the term "sound server" you probably
>> shouldn't be using Gentoo. 
>>
>> When I'm watching a YouTube video I still want to hear my email
>> client go bing or my chat program alert me of my buddy coming online. 
>>
>> That's not possible if my web-browser has a hard-wired path into my
>> soundcard and ain't letting go.
> 
> Just throwing out there that users can or atleast could use alsa plugs
> to have multiple applications. I did that before pulseaudio came along
> to play nfs carbon under cedega and listen to music.

Still can. dmix is pretty cool.

Still, that depends on applications not doing evil things with system
audio. Flash (at least when I decided to get comfortable with PA) did
evil things with system audio.

> 
> Also I have never got around to looking into Jackd but isn't it meant
> to be by far the best. I know pro audio users use it and I have heard it
> is not the easiest to set up but is there any reason why it isn't the
> default setup.
> 
> http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/JACK
> 
> From a quick look at this jack can hook up multiple applications that
> seem to need to be set up individually. What's the scope for Jack
> 
> a./ replacing pulseaudio
> 
> b./ having a compat interface layer to make pulseaudio compatible apps
> talk to jack
> 

jackd would be awesome. It could be much, much easier for me to use than
PA; my sound usage often goes beyond PA's ideal cases where they like to
declare that things "just work". Right now, PA is (somehow) bouncing
back speaker audio back into application recording, despite my
painstaking checking of the various defined places this is supposed to
be controllable. Results in echoes in VOIP.



[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

[gentoo-user] Re: [Bulk] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)]

On 2013-04-18, Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> > ...
>> > (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What
>> > does it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary
>> > layer of fat between sound applications and the kernel.  
>> 
>> If you don't understand the term "sound server" you probably
>> shouldn't be using Gentoo. 
>> 
>> When I'm watching a YouTube video I still want to hear my email
>> client go bing or my chat program alert me of my buddy coming online. 
>> 
>> That's not possible if my web-browser has a hard-wired path into my
>> soundcard and ain't letting go.
>
> Just throwing out there that users can or atleast could use alsa plugs
> to have multiple applications. I did that before pulseaudio came along
> to play nfs carbon under cedega and listen to music.

It should be noted that ALSA users can have multiple applications by
doing absolutely nothing other than using ALSA and using the
applications they want to use.

> Also I have never got around to looking into Jackd but isn't it meant
> to be by far the best. I know pro audio users use it and I have heard it
> is not the easiest to set up but is there any reason why it isn't the
> default setup.
>
> http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/JACK
>
> From a quick look at this jack can hook up multiple applications that
> seem to need to be set up individually. What's the scope for Jack
>
> a./ replacing pulseaudio
>
> b./ having a compat interface layer to make pulseaudio compatible apps
> talk to jack
>


-- 
Nuno Silva (aka njsg)
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [Bulk] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> >
> > Just throwing out there that users can or atleast could use alsa
> > plugs to have multiple applications. I did that before pulseaudio
> > came along to play nfs carbon under cedega and listen to music.  
> 
> It should be noted that ALSA users can have multiple applications by
> doing absolutely nothing other than using ALSA and using the
> applications they want to use.

So are you saying plugs are no longer required or that they are only
needed for certain apps that take over the audio device.


-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

[gentoo-user] Re: [Bulk] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)]

On 2013-04-21, Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> >
>> > Just throwing out there that users can or atleast could use alsa
>> > plugs to have multiple applications. I did that before pulseaudio
>> > came along to play nfs carbon under cedega and listen to music.  
>> 
>> It should be noted that ALSA users can have multiple applications by
>> doing absolutely nothing other than using ALSA and using the
>> applications they want to use.
>
> So are you saying plugs are no longer required or that they are only
> needed for certain apps that take over the audio device.

I don't even know exactly what ALSA plugs are, and ALSA has worked
perfectly for all these years, so yeah, whatever an ALSA plug is, either
it is not required anymore, or it is handled automagically by ALSA.

-- 
Nuno Silva (aka njsg)
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/

Re: [Bulk] [gentoo-user] Re: [Bulk] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> >
> > So are you saying plugs are no longer required or that they are only
> > needed for certain apps that take over the audio device.  
> 
> I don't even know exactly what ALSA plugs are, and ALSA has worked
> perfectly for all these years, so yeah, whatever an ALSA plug is, either
> it is not required anymore, or it is handled automagically by ALSA.

Just did a quick Google to refresh my memory and I used plug:dmix as the
device file name in order to prevent apps hogging the sound card.

From Wikipedia

"A card's interface is a description of an ALSA protocol for accessing
the card; possible interfaces include: hw, plughw, default, and
plug:dmix. The hw interface provides direct access to the kernel
device, but no software mixing or stream adaptation support. The plughw
and default enable sound output where the hw interface would produce an
error."

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 18/04/2013 21:32, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Gentoo.
> 
> I've just removed pulseaudio from my main Gentoo system.  Why?  Several
> reasons:
> 
> (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
> it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
> between sound applications and the kernel.

Ah yes, pulseaudio. The software that seems to solve a problem that does
not exist but actually does and which few people understand.

Expressed in conceptual black box terms, pulse audio is an effort to
deal with this scenario:

On a modern personal computing device, you have:

1. many input audio sources
2. many output audio sinks
3. many requirements for what happens in the middle

Audio apps tend to not be aware of the environment they run in, and not
be aware of what you want to happen with the sound. A bluetooth app has
no real way of knowing you want incoming phone calls to be sent to a
headset, to use the laptop's built-in mic and run the whole lot through
an audio filter to account for impaired hearing (i.e. boost the middle
frequencies). All whilst Amarok continues to play mp3s on speakers in
the next room.

True, that sounds contrived, but audio just works like that - consider
all the combinations you have on the sound system in your living room.

Trying to get apps to deal with this is an impossible task, so enter
pulseaudio. It knows about sources and sinks and has a config file so
that it can sit in the middle as a fat layer and apply this intelligence.

If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
category, so do many others.

Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
udev...)


> 
> (ii) I was having problems with the last 1-2 seconds being cut off audio
> streams from news sites.
> 
> (iii) The provenance of the code; it's author is also udev's maintainer,
> the udev that has given most of us so much fun over the months.  When
> might awkwardnesses start appearing in pulseaudio?
> 
> By the way, I run sound stuff mainly in Gnome 2, using aqualung to play
> CDs and listening to audio files streamed or downloaded from the net.
> 
> 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.
> 


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
> scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
> udev...)

Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
especially Gnome ones!

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

[gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[the guard]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 72 bytes --]

 Sound started working in Counter-Strike 1.6 only after i installed PA


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 300 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[William Hubbs]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 676 bytes --]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:49:19AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> > Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
> > scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
> > udev...)
> 
> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
> especially Gnome ones!

I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.

William

[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Hampicke]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 811 bytes --]

Am 23.04.2013 22:59, schrieb William Hubbs:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:49:19AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
>>> Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
>>> scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
>>> udev...)
>>
>> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
>> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
>> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
>> especially Gnome ones!
> 
> I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
> will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
> 
> William
> 

That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:12:56AM +0200, Michael Hampicke wrote

> >> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
> >> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
> >> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
> >> especially Gnome ones!
> > 
> > I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> > coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
> > will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
> > 
> > William
> > 
> 
> That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2

  From a logic chapter in a highschool math text, the "contrapositive"
version of this is that removing pulseaudio will require removing gnome.
See my sig...

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Hampicke]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 883 bytes --]

Am 24.04.2013 04:46, schrieb Walter Dnes:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:12:56AM +0200, Michael Hampicke wrote
> 
>>>> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
>>>> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
>>>> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
>>>> especially Gnome ones!
>>>
>>> I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
>>> coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
>>> will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
>>>
>>> William
>>>
>>
>> That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2
> 
>   From a logic chapter in a highschool math text, the "contrapositive"
> version of this is that removing pulseaudio will require removing gnome.
> See my sig...
> 
Hm, that seems to be.... TRUE :-)


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[William Hubbs]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 924 bytes --]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 10:46:12PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:12:56AM +0200, Michael Hampicke wrote
> 
> > >> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
> > >> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
> > >> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
> > >> especially Gnome ones!
> > > 
> > > I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> > > coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
> > > will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
> > > 
> > > William
> > > 
> > 
> > That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2
> 
>   From a logic chapter in a highschool math text, the "contrapositive"
> version of this is that removing pulseaudio will require removing gnome.
> See my sig...

and your point is?

William


[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alex Schuster]

Walter Dnes wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:12:56AM +0200, Michael Hampicke wrote

> > > I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> > > coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA,
> > > so you will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
> > 
> > That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2
> 
>   From a logic chapter in a highschool math text, the "contrapositive"
> version of this is that removing pulseaudio will require removing gnome.

I don't use it much, but I have Gnome installed, so I can play around
with it if I like. Whenever PulseAudio gets updated, I manually
rename /usr/bin/pulseaudio. I was never able to configure it, despite
some help from this list in the past, I think my problem is that my
internal sound card has two devices, and the HDMI one is default. For
ALSA I was able to switch them, with PulseAudio I had no success.

Sound behaviour is very erratic, and killing the pulseaudio process (or
not enabling it to start at all) seems to help. Although it still happens
that Amarok or Flash do not play sound, even though the test sound works
fine in the Phonon setup.

Quite annoying, but these days I have no time for that any more :-(

	Alex

Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> Am 23.04.2013 22:59, schrieb William Hubbs:
> > On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:49:19AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> >>> Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
> >>> scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
> >>> udev...)
> >>
> >> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
> >> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
> >> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
> >> especially Gnome ones!
> > 
> > I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> > coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
> > will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
> > 
> > William
> > 
> 
> That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2
> 

Are you sure, I know there have been a couple of times in the past
where Gnome has leaned towards Linux only but they have always steered
clear eventually. I know of one guy who runs a network of hundreds of
Gnome/OpenBSD machines that may wish to know about that as I think he
is already getting fed up with the increasing amount of code he has to
write in order to keep the port working.


-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Hampicke]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1438 bytes --]

Am 25.04.2013 22:10, schrieb Kevin Chadwick:
>> Am 23.04.2013 22:59, schrieb William Hubbs:
>>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:49:19AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
>>>>> Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
>>>>> scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
>>>>> udev...)
>>>>
>>>> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
>>>> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
>>>> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
>>>> especially Gnome ones!
>>>
>>> I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
>>> coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
>>> will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
>>>
>>> William
>>>
>>
>> That's true, gnome3.8 will require you to install pulseaudio-2
>>
> 
> Are you sure, I know there have been a couple of times in the past
> where Gnome has leaned towards Linux only but they have always steered
> clear eventually. I know of one guy who runs a network of hundreds of
> Gnome/OpenBSD machines that may wish to know about that as I think he
> is already getting fed up with the increasing amount of code he has to
> write in order to keep the port working.

Yes I'm sure, I have gnome 3.8 installed on my machine.
gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-shell have hard deps on pulseaudio.


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, William.

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 03:59:54PM -0500, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:49:19AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> > > Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
> > > scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
> > > udev...)

> > Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
> > users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
> > to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
> > especially Gnome ones!

> I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
> will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.

Any idea why?  Even on systems which lack audio entirely?

I hate this recent phenomenom, where disparate entities are bundled
together ever more tightly, reducing users' choice.

> William

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alecks Gates]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 5:46 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>
> Hello, William.
>
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 03:59:54PM -0500, William Hubbs wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:49:19AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> > > > Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
> > > > scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
> > > > udev...)
>
> > > Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
> > > users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
> > > to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
> > > especially Gnome ones!
>
> > I"m not a gnome user as of yet, but I can tell you that the day is
> > coming (Gnome 3.8 I believe) when gnome will not work without PA, so you
> > will have to install it if you want newer Gnome.
>
> Any idea why?  Even on systems which lack audio entirely?
>
> I hate this recent phenomenom, where disparate entities are bundled
> together ever more tightly, reducing users' choice.
>
> > William
>
> --
> Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
>

Not that it likely affects a lot of people, but pulseaudio can
transmit sound over the network to other pulseaudio servers -- a
possible use case I can think of are media centers, though I'm sure
there's more.  There's even a guy streaming audio from his Android
phone to another computer [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5-phFVfZnQ


--
Alecks Gates

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 5:19 AM, Alecks Gates <alecks.g@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not that it likely affects a lot of people, but pulseaudio can
> transmit sound over the network to other pulseaudio servers -- a
> possible use case I can think of are media centers, though I'm sure
> there's more.  There's even a guy streaming audio from his Android
> phone to another computer [1].
>
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5-phFVfZnQ

I did an LTSP cluster wayyy back, and pulseaudio's streaming was
helpful in getting sound to run on the right machine :)

--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [ ] up to you  [x] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:28:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote

> Audio apps tend to not be aware of the environment they run in, and not
> be aware of what you want to happen with the sound. A bluetooth app has
> no real way of knowing you want incoming phone calls to be sent to a
> headset, to use the laptop's built-in mic and run the whole lot through
> an audio filter to account for impaired hearing (i.e. boost the middle
> frequencies). All whilst Amarok continues to play mp3s on speakers in
> the next room.
> 
> True, that sounds contrived, but audio just works like that - consider
> all the combinations you have on the sound system in your living room.
> 
> Trying to get apps to deal with this is an impossible task, so enter
> pulseaudio. It knows about sources and sinks and has a config file so
> that it can sit in the middle as a fat layer and apply this intelligence.
> 
> If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
> people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
> fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
> category, so do many others.

  I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.

  Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
1% of edge cases is simply wrong.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3431 bytes --]

On 04/20/2013 05:34 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:28:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote
> 

[snip]

>> If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
>> people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
>> fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
>> category, so do many others.
> 
>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
> 
>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
> 

The sad thing is, I've not infrequently wound up with sound systems that
were *too* complex for PulseAudio to handle. At least, they were too
complex for the configuration interfaces available, and documentation
for how to do things more precisely (without writing code) was not
forthcoming.

Here's a scenario exactly as I was dealing with it around 2008:

Dodo was a combination HTPC/desktop box.[1] It had five displays and
three audio interfaces attached to it. Four of the displays sat on my
desk, one of the displays was a 32" 720p TV that served as the home
theater screen.[2] The machine was sometimes used in both roles at once.

The three audio interfaces were:

1) The onboard audio, which I sometimes used while using the box as a
workstation.
2) A USB audio device, which I used if I was chilling on the couch and
needed localized audio
3) A professional audio interface (I forget what, now) that fed my
receiver as well as a crossover that built an LFE channel.

PA kinda worked in this scenario, up until I physically interacted with
the USB audio device. If I plugged into that, *everything* would
suddenly route through the USB audio device, despite my careful routing
of different applications to different audio sources.

If I'd learned to use JACK, things probably would have been easier...but
I was using Ubuntu,[3] everything seemed designed around leveraging PA,
and I hadn't learned to discard fancy desktop environments yet.

You know the sad thing, though? ALSA would support that configuration
very well, too. It has enough internal routing and mixing logic that
it'd work.


[1] It was also the home gateway router, too, but that's another
story...and not much of one.
[2] Incidentally, this was the same setup where I'd successfully mixed
ATI and nVidia graphics hardware. I used the nvidia proprietary drivers
and the open-source support for ATI...which admittedly wasn't much. But
that's another story.
[3] I wasn't consistently using Gentoo yet. That rather relates to the
machine doubling as the network gateway...[4]
[4] No, I wouldn't do a setup this complicated as one machine as a
keystone in the network. At least, not again.


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 555 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:48 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/20/2013 05:34 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:28:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote
>>
>
> [snip]
>
>>> If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
>>> people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
>>> fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
>>> category, so do many others.
>>
>>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
>> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
>> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
>> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
>> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
>> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
>> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
>>
>>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
>> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
>> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
>> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
>> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
>>
>
> The sad thing is, I've not infrequently wound up with sound systems that
> were *too* complex for PulseAudio to handle. At least, they were too
> complex for the configuration interfaces available, and documentation
> for how to do things more precisely (without writing code) was not
> forthcoming.
>
> Here's a scenario exactly as I was dealing with it around 2008:
>
> Dodo was a combination HTPC/desktop box.[1] It had five displays and
> three audio interfaces attached to it. Four of the displays sat on my
> desk, one of the displays was a 32" 720p TV that served as the home
> theater screen.[2] The machine was sometimes used in both roles at once.
>
> The three audio interfaces were:
>
> 1) The onboard audio, which I sometimes used while using the box as a
> workstation.
> 2) A USB audio device, which I used if I was chilling on the couch and
> needed localized audio
> 3) A professional audio interface (I forget what, now) that fed my
> receiver as well as a crossover that built an LFE channel.
>
> PA kinda worked in this scenario, up until I physically interacted with
> the USB audio device. If I plugged into that, *everything* would
> suddenly route through the USB audio device, despite my careful routing
> of different applications to different audio sources.
>

Probably no longer needed, but this is done by a default pulseaudio
module, module-switch-on-connect, which is installed  by default on
Ubuntu.

In /etc/pulse/default.pa, there would be a line
load-module module-switch-on-connect

that would do this. If disabled, you keep your routing after connects.
No nice gui for configuring it as far as I can tell, though.

> If I'd learned to use JACK, things probably would have been easier...but
> I was using Ubuntu,[3] everything seemed designed around leveraging PA,
> and I hadn't learned to discard fancy desktop environments yet.
>
> You know the sad thing, though? ALSA would support that configuration
> very well, too. It has enough internal routing and mixing logic that
> it'd work.
>
>
> [1] It was also the home gateway router, too, but that's another
> story...and not much of one.
> [2] Incidentally, this was the same setup where I'd successfully mixed
> ATI and nVidia graphics hardware. I used the nvidia proprietary drivers
> and the open-source support for ATI...which admittedly wasn't much. But
> that's another story.
> [3] I wasn't consistently using Gentoo yet. That rather relates to the
> machine doubling as the network gateway...[4]
> [4] No, I wouldn't do a setup this complicated as one machine as a
> keystone in the network. At least, not again.
>



--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [ ] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [ ] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [ ] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 20/04/2013 11:34, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
>> > people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
>> > fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
>> > category, so do many others.

>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
> 

:-)

Well in my case it's the wife's Honda Accord station-wagon with the
gigantic boot I need for a month's groceries. But, I have teenagers in
my house. Teenagers change /everything/ :-)

But back to audio. My needs are simplistic - all sound goes through the
laptop speakers and I need one global volume knob. When a headset is
plugged into the 3.5mm jack, all sound goes there. For a mic, I have the
internal one and whilst there is a 3.5mm jack for an external mic, I've
never used it but I do expect it to work when plugged in and to
disconnect the internal mic.

Folk like Canek have complex setups that would drive me insane. I'm more
than happy to fiddle with all that on my HTPC and home audio system, but
never on my laptop.

There's the extremes. Now, how would we determine the % numbers of how
real users really use real audio?


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

sorry for breaking in... a very interesting discussion :)

On 20.04.2013 19:41, Alan McKinnon wrote:
 > ...
> But back to audio. My needs are simplistic - all sound goes through the
> laptop speakers and I need one global volume knob. When a headset is
> plugged into the 3.5mm jack, all sound goes there. For a mic, I have the
> internal one and whilst there is a 3.5mm jack for an external mic, I've
> never used it but I do expect it to work when plugged in and to
> disconnect the internal mic.

Absolutely true. I also can predict that ALSA config tools are at least 
no more complicated than any other sound system's, including PA.

> Folk like Canek have complex setups that would drive me insane. I'm more
> than happy to fiddle with all that on my HTPC and home audio system, but
> never on my laptop.
>
> There's the extremes. Now, how would we determine the % numbers of how
> real users really use real audio?

Probably there's no way. But at large, I believe it would not be a big 
error to say that 90% of linux users never need anything in excess of 
ALSA. Even that is, well, too optimistic for PA.

When I heard about some sort of problems with apps when starting them in 
a wrong order, or bugs in Flash, or in WINE, or wherever, and *the* 
sound server which is designed to fix those bugs, eh... Well, just 
remember a couple of years ago when there was OSS, and ALSA came in to 
fix the problems of OSS-aware software. And now one'd say: here's *the* 
sound server that solves all problems of ALSA-using software, ... so the 
question is how long will it take to create another sound-superserver 
which will take care of problems with *that* already-fixing-everything 
soundserver? Or should bugs probably be fixed in the bugged software?

Another aspect, to my mind, is that there's a misunderstanding what 
"sound server" is for. A software on its own should not need any kind of 
server, it should just input/output audio. ALSA is itself pretty well 
aware of what is input and what is output. If one needs something like 
playing one stream through e.g. mic and recording another stream through 
e.g. headphones, he'd just install whatever sound server he deems fit. 
But it's improper to have apps use the "sound server" interface 
directly, it's like a browser being forced to use MAC addresses instead 
of HTTP (or sockets). Why ever build apps with pulseaudio support (or 
any other stuff of that sort) if it is just a layer atop the sound 
system? And that's the problem with pulseaudio: it wants too much.
Another example, there's music composition software for windows which 
uses e.g. ASIO. But it's kinda stupid to require all windows audio 
software to support ASIO.
As for complex cases, there are some, certainly. But the rule is: don't 
oversimplify the complex, nor -- overcomplicate the simple. The latter 
seems the way to go for Lennart ...

-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:41 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> Folk like Canek have complex setups that would drive me insane. I'm more
> than happy to fiddle with all that on my HTPC and home audio system, but
> never on my laptop.

I'm pretty sure having a USB external harddrive was, at some point, a
"complex setup". Guess what: it isn't now.

Guess another one: having a BT headset is not, by all means, a
"complex setup" in this year and age.

> There's the extremes. Now, how would we determine the % numbers of how
> real users really use real audio?

It doesn't really matter; if Linux cannot handle normal systems (and
sorry, but handling a BT headset is, by all means, a "normal system"),
then Linux is no more than a server OS and perhaps a nice hobby OS.

So normal systems require PA. That *you* perhaps don't require PA is
another thing altogether.

This is, after all, the XXI century.

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Neil Bothwick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 886 bytes --]

On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:15:49 -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:

> So normal systems require PA. That *you* perhaps don't require PA is
> another thing altogether.

I think the important point from the original post, which appears to have
been lost, is that removing PA is a trivial (by Gentoo standards) task.
Negate one USE flag and update world and the system just keeps working
without PA. I discovered the opposite, that enabling it is just as easy.

That means it does really matter whether it is enabled or not in the
default profiles, because anyone running a completely default system is
wasting their time using Gentoo.

On for desktops and off for servers and other minimal profiles seems
eminently sensible and all of this argument makes bike-shedding seem like
important stuff.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Why do they call it a TV set when you only get one?

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: Text/Plain, Size: 2066 bytes --]

On Sunday 21 Apr 2013 11:28:56 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:15:49 -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> > So normal systems require PA. That *you* perhaps don't require PA is
> > another thing altogether.
> 
> I think the important point from the original post, which appears to have
> been lost, is that removing PA is a trivial (by Gentoo standards) task.
> Negate one USE flag and update world and the system just keeps working
> without PA. I discovered the opposite, that enabling it is just as easy.
> 
> That means it does really matter whether it is enabled or not in the
> default profiles, because anyone running a completely default system is
> wasting their time using Gentoo.
> 
> On for desktops 

I'm running 'default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop' on this box and the pulseaudio 
USE flag is inactive as far as portage is concerned.  None of my packages are 
bringing in pulseaudio either:

~ $ euse -I pulseaudio
global use flags (searching: pulseaudio)
************************************************************
[-      ] pulseaudio - Adds support for PulseAudio sound server

Installed packages matching this USE flag: 
app-accessibility/espeak-1.45.04
app-accessibility/speech-dispatcher-0.7.1-r1
kde-base/kmix-4.10.1-r1
kde-base/phonon-kde-4.10.1
media-libs/libao-1.1.0-r1
media-libs/libsdl-1.2.15-r2
media-libs/phonon-4.6.0-r1
media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta-0.10-r8
media-sound/mpg123-1.14.4
media-video/ffmpeg-0.10.7
media-video/mplayer-1.1-r1
media-video/vlc-2.0.5
net-libs/ptlib-2.10.10
net-misc/freerdp-1.1.0_pre20121004-r1
net-voip/ekiga-4.0.0-r1
www-client/chromium-26.0.1410.43

local use flags (searching: pulseaudio)
************************************************************
no matching entries found

I guess that the gnome/kde make.profiles may include this USE flag in their 
defaults?


> and off for servers and other minimal profiles seems
> eminently sensible and all of this argument makes bike-shedding seem like
> important stuff.

-- 
Regards,
Mick

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part. --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Dale]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 456 bytes --]

Mick wrote:
>
>
> I guess that the gnome/kde make.profiles may include this USE flag in
their
> defaults?
>
>

I'm on 13.0/desktop/kde profile.  It isn't included here either.

<<SNIP>>
local use flags (searching: pulseaudio)
************************************************************
no matching entries found
root@fireball / #

Dale

:-)  :-)

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or
how you interpreted my words!


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 891 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Neil Bothwick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 350 bytes --]

On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:24:25 -0500, Dale wrote:

> I'm on 13.0/desktop/kde profile.  It isn't included here either.

I've just checked and it doesn't appear to be enabled in any of the
profiles, which makes me wonder what anyone is complaining about...


-- 
Neil Bothwick

If there is light at the end of the tunnel...order more tunnel.

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Dale]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 620 bytes --]

Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:24:25 -0500, Dale wrote:
>
>> I'm on 13.0/desktop/kde profile.  It isn't included here either.
>
> I've just checked and it doesn't appear to be enabled in any of the
> profiles, which makes me wonder what anyone is complaining about...
>
>


That was my thinking.  If it is not enabled in the profile, looks like
something or someone else did it.  I run a fairly bloated KDE here so
surely I can't be missing some additional bloat by mistake.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-)

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or
how you interpreted my words!


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1096 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Neil.

On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 05:00:17PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:24:25 -0500, Dale wrote:

> > I'm on 13.0/desktop/kde profile.  It isn't included here either.

> I've just checked and it doesn't appear to be enabled in any of the
> profiles, which makes me wonder what anyone is complaining about...

pulseaudio is enabled in
/usr/portage/profiles/targets/desktop/gnome/make.defaults.

That's the only place I can find where it's enabled.

> -- 
> Neil Bothwick

> If there is light at the end of the tunnel...order more tunnel.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

[gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[walt]

On 04/21/2013 03:28 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:15:49 -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> 
>> So normal systems require PA. That *you* perhaps don't require PA is
>> another thing altogether.

> bike-shedding

Been a long time since I've seen that used in a linux mailing list :)

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Neil Bothwick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1361 bytes --]

On Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:34:14 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:

>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.

I think your percentage guesstimates may be more than a little out. I
have a bluetooth headset and bluetooth speakers, bought for use with my
phone. With that phone, they just work. Why should I expect any less from
a proper computer?

If you install a desktop system, you have a right to expect it to be able
to do all the desktop things. If you don't want that, choose a different
profile. You don't even need to fiddle with USE flags, .if you want a full
desktop setup just pick an appropriate profile; if you don't, ditto

I never saw the need for PA for my needs, but I needed to help someone
experiencing sound problem and they used PA, so I set the USE flag and
updated; expected some fun and games. But it all just carried on working.
I have more control options, which pleases me as a control freak, but the
default installation of PA was all but invisible.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Taglines are like cars - You get a good one, then someone nicks it.

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 198 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
>
>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.

The "complexity" overhead of pulseaudio is vaaastly overstated here.

Yes, as a general principle, adding unneeded complexity is bad. But that takes
into account general ideas on the relative tradeoffs of having it there or not.
But listen to the happy PA users here who don't feel any problem with their
setup. The complexity doesn't bite them.

Analogy:
99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point of installing it
by default on most desktop systems is that you can't predict who will need it,
and _it does not harm_ (or very little harm) to the people who don't.

So your tradeoffs are:
A) no a11y unless elected by user:
- for the 1%: a11y is a pain to install because the user might not
even be able to see the screen (very big pain)
- for the 99% use a few megabytes less on their disk. (very small gain)

B) a11y for everyone unless elected removed:
- for the 1%: they can use the system properly (no pain)
- for the 99%: use a few megabytes more on their disk (very small pain)

Obviously (B) is a better default choice. Ditto pulseaudio.
--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

On 25.04.2013 19:48, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
> wrote:
>> I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
>> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an
>> 18-wheeler semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission
>> (plus air brakes that require months of training to manage/use) is
>> much more powerful than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to
>> hauling huge loads.  But for someoneone who merely wants to zip out
>> to the supermarket and buy a week's groceries, the hatchback is
>> much more appropriate.
>>
>> Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
>> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are
>> from the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to
>> justify PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to
>> handle the 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
>
> The "complexity" overhead of pulseaudio is vaaastly overstated here.
>
> Yes, as a general principle, adding unneeded complexity is bad. But
> that takes into account general ideas on the relative tradeoffs of
> having it there or not. But listen to the happy PA users here who
> don't feel any problem with their setup. The complexity doesn't bite
> them.

That is not a good argument. If it were that easy, then why not just
install everything -- or even simply untar all software -- at once?
People say that HDDs are big now. And that would do for 99% users,
wouldn't it? Instead, you're still messing with all that package 
managing stuff...

As for the complexity of PA, one must distinguish the PA architecture
complexity, its installation complexity and the complexity of managing
this stuff for the user (not mentioning usage complexity which is
probably negligible).

I wouldn't care for the architecture complexity (although I assume it to
be too complex) but what I do care about is its bad manageability.
If it were to install just a package, or just remove one package, then 
everyone would be satisfied, including those who need the functionality. 
But apparently it isn't so; either all audio software is to use PA, or 
none at all.

> Analogy: 99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point
> of installing it by default on most desktop systems is that you can't
> predict who will need it, and _it does not harm_ (or very little
> harm) to the people who don't.
>
> So your tradeoffs are: A) no a11y unless elected by user: - for the
> 1%: a11y is a pain to install because the user might not even be able
> to see the screen (very big pain) - for the 99% use a few megabytes
> less on their disk. (very small gain)
>
> B) a11y for everyone unless elected removed: - for the 1%: they can
> use the system properly (no pain) - for the 99%: use a few megabytes
> more on their disk (very small pain)

> Obviously (B) is a better default choice. Ditto pulseaudio.

Well if PA is that great then why really not do like you suggest? 
Probably, the problem is not "a few megabytes more on their disk" but 
that PA is just not a good alternative?

And eventually is there a real big unsolvable problem for one to 
*install* PA when he needs? Does one really end up with "black screen" 
or another kinda PITA without PA? If not, then it's not a good analogy?

But as I feel it, the talk is about choice, not PA nor complexity. I 
just *don't want* it. I probably don't see any harm with various 
akonadis and nepomuks in KDE (actually, I did see much harm, but that's 
another story) but I simply don't want'em. As a result (of all those 
useless-for-me pieces of great code removed) I have Gentoo running KDE 
times faster than e.g. OpenSUSE, but even without that, it's my choice 
and if I don't perceive or measure these "times faster" I believe in 
them. Why should I care that there is a 99% majority of users who say 
that some stuff are harmless or they need them on their PCs, if *I* 
don't need it on *my* PC? -- Here "I" means "one".
If free software is going to be really free, then it is not expected to 
make assumptions about what I need or what 99% users need, nor to make 
its use unavoidable. It is expected to provide a means to use it, as 
well a means to not use it.

-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff

[gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Steven J. Long]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 09:31:43PM +0400, Yuri K. Shatroff wrote:
> On 25.04.2013 19:48, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
> > wrote:
> >> I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
> >> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an
> >> 18-wheeler semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission
> >> (plus air brakes that require months of training to manage/use) is
> >> much more powerful than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to
> >> hauling huge loads.  But for someoneone who merely wants to zip out
> >> to the supermarket and buy a week's groceries, the hatchback is
> >> much more appropriate.
> >>
> >> Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
> >> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are
> >> from the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to
> >> justify PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to
> >> handle the 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.

Exactly. If you think you have to make 100% of cases more complex just
to handle an edge 1%, YDIW. No ifs nor buts about it.

> > The "complexity" overhead of pulseaudio is vaaastly overstated here.
> >
> > Yes, as a general principle, adding unneeded complexity is bad. But
> > that takes into account general ideas on the relative tradeoffs of
> > having it there or not. But listen to the happy PA users here who
> > don't feel any problem with their setup. The complexity doesn't bite
> > them.

> As for the complexity of PA, one must distinguish the PA architecture
> complexity, its installation complexity and the complexity of managing
> this stuff for the user (not mentioning usage complexity which is
> probably negligible).
> 
> I wouldn't care for the architecture complexity (although I assume it to
> be too complex) but what I do care about is its bad manageability.
> If it were to install just a package, or just remove one package, then 
> everyone would be satisfied, including those who need the functionality. 
> But apparently it isn't so; either all audio software is to use PA, or 
> none at all.
> 
> > Analogy: 99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point
> > of installing it by default on most desktop systems is that you can't
> > predict who will need it, and _it does not harm_ (or very little
> > harm) to the people who don't.
> >
> > So your tradeoffs are: A) no a11y unless elected by user: - for the
> > 1%: a11y is a pain to install because the user might not even be able
> > to see the screen (very big pain) - for the 99% use a few megabytes
> > less on their disk. (very small gain)
> >
> > B) a11y for everyone unless elected removed: - for the 1%: they can
> > use the system properly (no pain) - for the 99%: use a few megabytes
> > more on their disk (very small pain)
> 
> > Obviously (B) is a better default choice. Ditto pulseaudio.

That's assuming it were simply a case of a few megabytes of disk space.
But as pointed out, it's also a case of upstream wanting everyone to
change the way they do things across the board, in the name of
"convenience". It doesn't seem like these "convenience" layers really
make anyone's life easier in the longer-term.

Instead of working behind the scenes so that existing methods function
more capably, everyone has to change their code to a new API, whose
developers wouldn't know an ABI-promise if it smacked them on the head,
and all users have to change their setups. Hardly making everyone's
life easier, and "breaking userspace" as if it were lucrative.

Further, they appear to have a tendency to break when you want to do
something "unusual", or as most people think of it, use your machine as
you see fit. That's a problem common to all idiot-box software, when
they try to guess and don't listen.

If I wanted that, I wouldn't have fled Windows development over a decade
ago.

> Well if PA is that great then why really not do like you suggest? 
> Probably, the problem is not "a few megabytes more on their disk" but 
> that PA is just not a good alternative?
> 
> And eventually is there a real big unsolvable problem for one to 
> *install* PA when he needs? Does one really end up with "black screen" 
> or another kinda PITA without PA? If not, then it's not a good analogy?

Precisely.
 
> But as I feel it, the talk is about choice, not PA nor complexity. I 
> just *don't want* it. I probably don't see any harm with various 
> akonadis and nepomuks in KDE (actually, I did see much harm, but that's 
> another story) but I simply don't want'em. As a result (of all those 
> useless-for-me pieces of great code removed) I have Gentoo running KDE 
> times faster than e.g. OpenSUSE, but even without that, it's my choice 
> and if I don't perceive or measure these "times faster" I believe in 
> them.

I'm with you there: after I removed semantic-craptop, my KDE came back to
me :-) I went a bit further and removed the nubkit stuff, and things
actually work a lot better. It was hard giving up kmail[1] but once I'd
overcome that barrier, losing nubkit was a trivial thing to do, after I
read Dominique's wonderful write-up[2].

The other thing I did was switch my /bin/sh symlink to point to busybox,
ie /bin/bb which I'd used as SHELL when working with mutt, where it was
noticeably quicker (I had to test procmail setup quite a bit, before I
got it running nicely.) There were a couple of initscripts that needed
patching, though everything still worked. But the difference is amazing.

Boot time, which has never been a concern to me, sped up by orders of
magnitude in terms of user perception: I used to get time to read all
the initscript messages. Now I glance away, and they're gone. More
importantly, the _rest_ of my system sped up as well.

It's important to note that this is only feasible because of the modular
design of Unix. And frankly it makes me laugh at the dead-end One True
Inturgrated Way being touted so much.

> Why should I care that there is a 99% majority of users who say 
> that some stuff are harmless or they need them on their PCs, if *I* 
> don't need it on *my* PC? -- Here "I" means "one".

> If free software is going to be really free, then it is not expected to 
> make assumptions about what I need or what 99% users need, nor to make 
> its use unavoidable. It is expected to provide a means to use it, as 
> well a means to not use it.

That is one of my favourite quotes this year: I hope you don't mind if
I repeat it? It sums up exactly what we should be aiming for, and what
we're not getting.

Regards,
steveL.

[1] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-945868.html
[2] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-938680.html
-- 
#friendly-coders -- We're friendly, but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:31 AM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
> On 25.04.2013 19:48, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
>>> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an
>>> 18-wheeler semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission
>>> (plus air brakes that require months of training to manage/use) is
>>> much more powerful than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to
>>> hauling huge loads.  But for someoneone who merely wants to zip out
>>> to the supermarket and buy a week's groceries, the hatchback is
>>> much more appropriate.
>>>
>>> Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
>>> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are
>>> from the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to
>>> justify PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to
>>> handle the 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
>>
>>
>> The "complexity" overhead of pulseaudio is vaaastly overstated here.
>>
>> Yes, as a general principle, adding unneeded complexity is bad. But
>> that takes into account general ideas on the relative tradeoffs of
>> having it there or not. But listen to the happy PA users here who
>> don't feel any problem with their setup. The complexity doesn't bite
>> them.
>
>
> That is not a good argument. If it were that easy, then why not just
> install everything -- or even simply untar all software -- at once?
> People say that HDDs are big now. And that would do for 99% users,
> wouldn't it? Instead, you're still messing with all that package managing
> stuff...

There is a a very huge difference between "all software at once" and
"one particular small package with a proven use".

> I wouldn't care for the architecture complexity (although I assume it to
> be too complex) but what I do care about is its bad manageability.
> If it were to install just a package, or just remove one package, then
> everyone would be satisfied, including those who need the functionality. But
> apparently it isn't so; either all audio software is to use PA, or none at
> all.

BEEEP. Wrong. The same niggles that allow ALSA to multi-audio without
pulseaudio are magically not erased by installing pulseaudio. It's
just that - what's the point? If you can adjust the volume of M.A.R.S
A Ridiculous Shooter independently of the volume of your flash plugin,
why would you want to exempt vlc or thunderbird from the same?

> Well if PA is that great then why really not do like you suggest? Probably,
> the problem is not "a few megabytes more on their disk" but that PA is just
> not a good alternative?

Haven't "heard" any reason to think otherwise, pun intended. Even with
projects that hate pulseaudio's guts and don't want to play with them,
I can make them be happy with pasuspender.

> And eventually is there a real big unsolvable problem for one to *install*
> PA when he needs? Does one really end up with "black screen" or another
> kinda PITA without PA? If not, then it's not a good analogy.
>
> But as I feel it, the talk is about choice, not PA nor complexity. I just
> *don't want* it.

The analogy isn't that the desktop is broken without PA. The analogy
was only to show that there are tradeoffs that go into considering
"added complexity", which were blindly being considered as a
set-in-stone rule for designing systems. I'm sorry, that's a terrible
rule to live by when designing systems for real people. It's just a
guideline. You _must_ consider the tradeoffs. There is no substitute
for considering the tradeoffs

Now obviously with gentoo, we already have a choice to put it in or
not, so I'm guessing you're evaluating non-gentoo choices to put it in
by default. So you're effectively criticizing gnobuntudora.

The gnobuntudora choice to include it by default makes sense, because
they are often catering to environments where even mentioning the
package manager to the average user is already "too technical" for
them. So in their calculus, the 99% who don't need it don't suffer,
but the 1% who need it do and will suffer. You haven't demonstrated
that you've given the same depth of considerations to this.

--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:48:07PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote

> Analogy:
> 99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point of
> installing it by default on most desktop systems is that you can't
> predict who will need it,
> and _it does not harm_ (or very little harm) > to the people who don't.
************************
************************
************************

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 07:32:24PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote
> Hello, Gentoo.

 [...deletia...]

> (ii) I was having problems with the last 1-2 seconds being cut off
> audio
> streams from news sites.

 [...deletia...]

> 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.  :-)

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:48:14AM -0400, Michael Mol wrote

> PA kinda worked in this scenario, up until I physically interacted
> with the USB audio device. If I plugged into that, *everything*
> would suddenly route through the USB audio device, despite my careful
> routing of different applications to different audio sources.

 [...deletia...]

> You know the sad thing, though? ALSA would support that configuration
> very well, too. It has enough internal routing and mixing logic that
> it'd work.

  And a Google search turns up a lot more cases.

> So your tradeoffs are:
> A) no a11y unless elected by user:
> - for the 1%: a11y is a pain to install

  How "painfull" is it to add "pulseaudio" to USE in make.conf and then
emerge --changed-use world

> because the user might not even be able to see the screen (very big pain)

  Are you seriously arguing that a linux system will black-screen at
bootup due to lack of pulseaudio?

> B) a11y for everyone unless elected removed:
> - for the 1%: they can use the system properly (no pain)
> - for the 99%: use a few megabytes more on their disk (very small pain)

  That is a strawman argument that avoids the question.  This is *NOT*
about "a few megabytes" of disk space.  It's about an extra layer on top
of the system, chewing up memory, slowing it down, and interacting with
other software to cause problems.  *THAT* is what it's about.

  New Windows machines tend to come with so many "craplets" that programs
like "PC Decrapifier" http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ are necessary.
Android smartphones come stuffed with their garbage, and they have to be
rooted to get rid of it.  One reason I chose linux, and especially
Gentoo, is that it allows me to avoid stuff I don't want/need.  Thanks
to USE="-*" plus judicious USE flags, I've got an almost-6-year-old Dell
with a Core Duo CPU and an onboard Intel GPU running NHL GameCentreLive.
Think of USE="-*" plus ICEWM as my version of "Linux Decrapifier".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:17 AM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:48:07PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote
>> Analogy:
>> 99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point of
>> installing it by default on most desktop systems is that you can't
>> predict who will need it,
>> and _it does not harm_ (or very little harm) > to the people who don't.>
> [ list of pa horror anecdotes ]
>   And a Google search turns up a lot more cases.
>> So your tradeoffs are:
>> A) no a11y unless elected by user:
>> - for the 1%: a11y is a pain to install
>
>   How "painfull" is it to add "pulseaudio" to USE in make.conf and then
> emerge --changed-use world
>

So how "painful" is it to not add pulseaudio to your USE flag? You're
comparing a gentoo user's experience, where we willingly wade in stuff
to fix, to, say, an gnobuntudora user's experience, where all of this
is automatic and made to "just work"... I wouldn't be surprised if the
horror stories had to do with configuring the damned thing. It's
actually interesting how dated (read:solved) some of the lag issues
are when I _do_ google them which is revealing....

>> because the user might not even be able to see the screen (very big pain)
>
>   Are you seriously arguing that a linux system will black-screen at
> bootup due to lack of pulseaudio?

See my previous message: no. I'm arguing that a very simplistic take
on "more complexity = automatic bad" is misguided.

>   That is a strawman argument that avoids the question.  This is *NOT*
> about "a few megabytes" of disk space.  It's about an extra layer on top
> of the system, chewing up memory, slowing it down, and interacting with
> other software to cause problems.  *THAT* is what it's about.

The "extra layer" that eats up so much memory (megabytes), slowdown
(megabytes!), and software bogging (more megabytes!) that it's a
wonder why anybody's desktop works as is. Oh wait.

YES it is entirely about a few megabytes you don't like. A few
megabytes that OTHER people choose to put on THEIR computers to NO
effect on yours. Even your sig betrays your bias.

> --
> Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
>

--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

On 26.04.2013 12:34, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> YES it is entirely about a few megabytes you don't like. A few
> megabytes that OTHER people choose to put on THEIR computers to NO
> effect on yours.

YES it is entirely about a software I don't like. If other people choose 
to like the software is the problem of those people, but there is no way 
other people can (may, dare) make me like it. Note that I do not force 
other people to remove, avoid, or hate PA, nor do most others opposed to PA.

There may be a wagon of reasons why I don't like it, from its name to 
its author's coding style to my experience with it 175 years ago, and 
for me these are all fair reasons. If you have your fair reasons to use 
it, please go ahead, but that doesn't imply that someone else is also 
going to need it, accept it, like it, or stop criticizing it. We've got 
freedom of speech, haven't we? ;-)

If you find my arguments inconclusive, neither do I find your arguments 
"it won't harm, it will have no effect, etc". As for `technical 
arguments`, much of them are as subjective as most non-technical 
arguments (e.g. `true unix way`, or `coding style`, or `a few megabytes` 
or `slowdown` as well as `NO effect` are all both technical and subjective).

In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is 
for me on my computers.


-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yohan Pereira]

On 26/04/13 at 04:05pm, Yuri K. Shatroff wrote:
> There may be a wagon of reasons why I don't like it, from its name to 
> its author's coding style to my experience with it 175 years ago, and 
> for me these are all fair reasons. 

Woah poettering wrote software that ran on this thing ? if so He just earned
some respect in my books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine

:D


-- 

- Yohan Pereira

The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference
between a mermaid and a seal.
                -- Mark Twain

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

On 26.04.2013 16:56, Yohan Pereira wrote:
> On 26/04/13 at 04:05pm, Yuri K. Shatroff wrote:
>> There may be a wagon of reasons why I don't like it, from its name to
>> its author's coding style to my experience with it 175 years ago, and
>> for me these are all fair reasons.
>
> Woah poettering wrote software that ran on this thing ? if so He just earned
> some respect in my books.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine

Considering global effort on pushing his code, I sometimes doubt that he 
didn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering

"Since 2003, Poettering has worked in more than 40 software projects"
An average of 4 projects a year, statistics says. I don't rely on 
statistics though.

-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
> In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is for
> me on my computers.

Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread,
though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to
think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally
installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100%
of the users being "forced" to have pulseaudio in?

And don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about here. If
somewhere up there we're talking about "enforced" choices we're not
talking about gentoo, we're talking about stuff like Fedora or Ubuntu
and even "enforced" is a stretch as you could always go with a
minimal, alternate, or a forked desktop. And it's pretty obvious why
they thought it was sane for pulse to be a default choice.

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.

Well I have a better theory, "they" made choices for "defaults-using
users" that "you can totally undo" for "pretty decent reasons" but
"some of us" just want to "feel better" about the "choices" we made by
"pointing and laughing" at the ones we didn't. Even when we know so
"much" about the topic that someone actually has to tell us what a
"sound server" is or what its "use cases" are and our "use patterns"
involve typing things in a black box so that pretty text scrolls
quickly and makes us "feel smart" whereas the use patterns of the
average user, uh... "don't".

It's a sane idea for a desktop distro to include pulse as a -default-.
No, seriously, it is. Just, frigging bluetooth headsets. And
per-application volume control. Are there other ways to go about it?
Yeah. It remains to be seen how any of them are an order of magnitude
better than pulse. You don't -like- it? Fine. There's no point in
going on on some tirade about how the poor, oppressed 99% of users
could have been doing just fine with ALSA just like you have with your
more beautiful, hand-crafted system...
--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

'evening, Mark.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:41:01PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
> > In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is for
> > me on my computers.

> Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread,
> though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to
> think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally
> installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100%
> of the users being "forced" to have pulseaudio in?

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.

> And don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about here. If
> somewhere up there we're talking about "enforced" choices we're not
> talking about gentoo, we're talking about stuff like Fedora or Ubuntu
> and even "enforced" is a stretch as you could always go with a
> minimal, alternate, or a forked desktop. And it's pretty obvious why
> they thought it was sane for pulse to be a default choice.

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

> 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".

> Well I have a better theory, "they" made choices for "defaults-using
> users" that "you can totally undo" for "pretty decent reasons" but
> "some of us" just want to "feel better" about the "choices" we made by
> "pointing and laughing" at the ones we didn't. Even when we know so
> "much" about the topic that someone actually has to tell us what a
> "sound server" is or what its "use cases" are and our "use patterns"
> involve typing things in a black box so that pretty text scrolls
> quickly and makes us "feel smart" whereas the use patterns of the
> average user, uh... "don't".

It was me that started this thread, and me that needed that info.  Why
do you have to be so disparaging about the process of learning?

> It's a sane idea for a desktop distro to include pulse as a -default-.
> No, seriously, it is. Just, frigging bluetooth headsets.

Do you frig bluetooth headsets?  Can't say I do.

> And per-application volume control. Are there other ways to go about
> it?  Yeah. It remains to be seen how any of them are an order of
> magnitude better than pulse. You don't -like- it? Fine. There's no
> point in going on on some tirade about how the poor, oppressed 99% of
> users could have been doing just fine with ALSA just like you have
> with your more beautiful, hand-crafted system...

Yes, I took pulse out of my beautiful system.  As it turns out, it
hasn't (?completely) solved the problem of loosing the last few hundred
milliseconds of audio downloads.  But at least from now on, that's one
fewer possible source of problems on my system.

> --

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

'afternoon, Canek!

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:02:38PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> 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.

That's a strawman argument.  Anytime a free software project drops
support for something, it forces its users to make choices.  Yes, force.

> 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.

Free software developers, having got people to commit to using their
software, have responsibilities, albeit moral ones.  The prime one is to
support their users.  You'll surely have noticed that what gets up the
noses of people on this mailing list most is when support for reasonable
configurations gets dropped.  Witness all the recent trouble over eth0,
for example.

> > 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.

WADR, that is simply false.  With features which interact chaotically
with eachother, yes, you have exponential growth.  With distinct,
self-contained features, each one is merely an incremental test effort.
ALSA and pulseaudio are self-contained, and are also well tested in their
own right.  Only integration needs testing.

If you were serious about this exponential growth, how on earth could,
e.g., the Linux kernel or Emacs, both with thousands of options[*],
possibly get tested anywhere near acceptably?

[*] 12,666 in Linux 3.7.10, 7,510 in vanilla Emacs 24.3.

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

No.  The gnome developers.  I test and support all reasonable (and many
unreasonable) combinations on my own free software project.

> 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.

What about the needs of those high-end audio users, for example, who need
jack?

What about those, like me, with audio problems, where the need exists to
strip a system down so as to isolate those problems?

> 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.

pulseaudio is a server component - gnome is an application.  They are at
different levels of the system hierarchy, just as a mail transport agent
and mail user agent are.  The maintainers of mutt don't force the use of,
say, postfix.  By long tradition on *nix, sysadmins configure their own
systems, selecting those components which best fit their needs.  gnome's
decision to mandate pulseaudio interferes with this tradition.  IMAO,
this is a Bad Thing.

> 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.

Making minor changes to free software is impracticable on a casual basis.
Only forking a project can do this.  You know this full well.

> 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.

It come pretty close.  :-)

> Regards.
> --
> Canek Peláez Valdés

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> 'afternoon, Canek!

Hi Alan.

> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:02:38PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> 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.
>
> That's a strawman argument.  Anytime a free software project drops
> support for something, it forces its users to make choices.  Yes, force.

I don't think that's true, since we are not paying anyone to do the
work (well, at least for sure I'm not paying anyone to do anything).
They (the developers) don't own us *anything*.

>> 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.
>
> Free software developers, having got people to commit to using their
> software, have responsibilities, albeit moral ones.

If you want to get into morals, this will become a religious argument,
and sorry but I'm not interested in that.

> The prime one is to support their users.

No; the prime one is to do their jobs. Most of them are employed by
several of the available Open Source supporting companies; their
responsibilities is to do the job they are being paid to do. If they
are hobbyist, then their prime "responsibility" is to do whatever the
hell they want to (and gets accepted in a community project).

>  You'll surely have noticed that what gets up the
> noses of people on this mailing list most is when support for reasonable
> configurations gets dropped.  Witness all the recent trouble over eth0,
> for example.

What problem? I use NetworkManager in desktop and laptop; there is no
problem there. I read the instructions in my media center and servers:
no problems there. I don't particularly like the new funny names, but
I don't write the code, and the fruits from it I get for free, so I
don't complain about it.

>> > 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.
>
> WADR, that is simply false.  With features which interact chaotically
> with eachother, yes, you have exponential growth.  With distinct,
> self-contained features, each one is merely an incremental test effort.
> ALSA and pulseaudio are self-contained, and are also well tested in their
> own right.  Only integration needs testing.

OK, I exaggerated a bit; but who is going to do the integration
testing? You? Because the GNOME developers have no interest in doing
that, and I support their decision.

> If you were serious about this exponential growth, how on earth could,
> e.g., the Linux kernel or Emacs, both with thousands of options[*],
> possibly get tested anywhere near acceptably?
>
> [*] 12,666 in Linux 3.7.10, 7,510 in vanilla Emacs 24.3.

Because they have enough integration testers. They have enough
interested users to do the required testing; the kernel and Emacs is
oriented towards technical apt users. The stated goal of the GNOME
project is that even my grandmother could use it.

>> Who is going to code, test, support and bug fix all those possible
>> configurations? You?
>
> No.  The gnome developers.

Why? Because you say so? Do you pay them?

>  I test and support all reasonable (and many
> unreasonable) combinations on my own free software project.

Good for you: that's your call. It's not your call to say what the
GNOME developers should use.

>> 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.
>
> What about the needs of those high-end audio users, for example, who need
> jack?

There are several success stories about mixing PA with Jack; you can
Google them. I don't see the problem.

> What about those, like me, with audio problems, where the need exists to
> strip a system down so as to isolate those problems?

As I said below: if PA has problems, they need to be fixed. Did you
report the bugs?

>> 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.
>
> pulseaudio is a server component - gnome is an application.  They are at
> different levels of the system hierarchy, just as a mail transport agent
> and mail user agent are.  The maintainers of mutt don't force the use of,
> say, postfix.  By long tradition on *nix, sysadmins configure their own
> systems, selecting those components which best fit their needs.  gnome's
> decision to mandate pulseaudio interferes with this tradition.  IMAO,
> this is a Bad Thing.

GNOME is a desktop environment, and it wants (from some years now) a
vertical integration from kernel to the last userspace application. I
root for that.

And I have been using Unix since 1996, and I don't care about what
*nix "long traditions" are. I want a Linux system that works from my
cellphone to my big iron server, and everything in between. I don't
even care about *BSD; I don't wish them any ill, but I don't care
about them.

If you don't agree with that, that's fine; but if a big enough set of
developers thinks similarly, several projects will move in that
direction. It's already happening.

>> 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.
>
> Making minor changes to free software is impracticable on a casual basis.
> Only forking a project can do this.  You know this full well.

Well, fork away then. It's in your freedoms when it comes to free
software. Look at the success stories from MATE, Cinnamon, the Trinity
Desktop Environment and eudev.

>> 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.
>
> It come pretty close.  :-)

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/85223

"I'm not sure about the future of the core of OpenRC:

Upstart & systemd have some clear architectural benefits, despite their
implementation shortcomings (either upstream or per-distro).
The /usr merge is inevitable, as is the integration of other components
into the init system (udev, dbus, ...). What has become dis-integrated instead
is the configuration: lots of hardware ships specific udev rules with few
problems."

That's a Gentoo developer talking. Many of them think like that; many
of them oppose them. But the truth is, Linux distributions are moving
to a vertical, tightly integrated OS. There will always be niche
distros for the people that don't like this (and hey, that's the
beauty of using Free Software), but the big distros are going that
way. It's possible that Gentoo will follow (as did Arch, as
Debian-based Tanglu and Gentoo-based Sabayon are doing).

Greg Korah-Hartman will integrate an incarnation of dbus (or something
really similar) into the kernel:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/111049168280159033135/posts/BDgg5DKVjkX

and then the only required dependency for systemd will be Linux.

Man, that will be a nice day.

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Canek.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 02:09:46PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:

> Hi Alan.

> > On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:02:38PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> >> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:29 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> >> [snip]

> > Anytime a free software project drops support for something, it
> > forces its users to make choices.  Yes, force.

> I don't think that's true, since we are not paying anyone to do the
> work (well, at least for sure I'm not paying anyone to do anything).
> They (the developers) don't owe us *anything*.

In a sense, no.  But in another very important sense, yes.  Without that
sense of duty, of obligation, on the part of developers over the last few
decades, GNU, Linux, X, BSD, ... would scarcely rate as more than toys.

[ ..... ]

> If you want to get into morals, this will become a religious argument,
> and sorry but I'm not interested in that.

Fair enough!  

> > The prime one is to support their users.

> No; the prime one is to do their jobs. Most of them are employed by
> several of the available Open Source supporting companies; their
> responsibilities is to do the job they are being paid to do. If they
> are hobbyist, then their prime "responsibility" is to do whatever the
> hell they want to (and gets accepted in a community project).

Again, fair enough.  But that's just as "religious" a viewpoint as my
own.

> >  You'll surely have noticed that what gets up the
> > noses of people on this mailing list most is when support for reasonable
> > configurations gets dropped.  Witness all the recent trouble over eth0,
> > for example.

> What problem? I use NetworkManager in desktop and laptop; there is no
> problem there. I read the instructions in my media center and servers:
> no problems there. I don't particularly like the new funny names, but
> I don't write the code, and the fruits from it I get for free, so I
> don't complain about it.

Some Gentooers had problems over this change.  I didn't have "problems"
as such, but the time spent not having these problems could, I feel, have
been better spent.

> > If you were serious about this exponential growth, how on earth could,
> > e.g., the Linux kernel or Emacs, both with thousands of options[*],
> > possibly get tested anywhere near acceptably?

> > [*] 12,666 in Linux 3.7.10, 7,510 in vanilla Emacs 24.3.

> Because they have enough integration testers. They have enough
> interested users to do the required testing; the kernel and Emacs is
> oriented towards technical apt users. The stated goal of the GNOME
> project is that even my grandmother could use it.

I understand what you're saying.  In the limit, this tight integration
will lead to a system barely capable of being customised.  It will be as
inflexible as MS Windows always has been.  Will your GM want to use such
a system?

[ .... ]

> > What about the needs of those high-end audio users, for example, who need
> > jack?

> There are several success stories about mixing PA with Jack; you can
> Google them. I don't see the problem.

I'm not an expert on jack, but I gather it's high-endedness implies very
low latency, for example.  Feeding a signal through pulseaudio as well
would negate the whole purpose of jack.  Maybe.

> > What about those, like me, with audio problems, where the need exists to
> > strip a system down so as to isolate those problems?

> As I said below: if PA has problems, they need to be fixed. Did you
> report the bugs?

I don't even know where the bug is.  It's somewhere in my audio.  It
might be in Firefox 17.0.5.  It might be in pulseaudio, though having
been able to remove it, I doubt it.  It might be in ALSA.  My point is,
in a tightly integrated system, my chances of fixing the problem would be
that much slimmer.  I don't experience the problem in my fossilised mdev
system from last summer.

> >> 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.

> > pulseaudio is a server component - gnome is an application.  They are at
> > different levels of the system hierarchy, just as a mail transport agent
> > and mail user agent are.  The maintainers of mutt don't force the use of,
> > say, postfix.  By long tradition on *nix, sysadmins configure their own
> > systems, selecting those components which best fit their needs.  gnome's
> > decision to mandate pulseaudio interferes with this tradition.  IMAO,
> > this is a Bad Thing.

> GNOME is a desktop environment, and it wants (from some years now) a
> vertical integration from kernel to the last userspace application. I
> root for that.

That would probably be an environment I couldn't configure to work the
way I want.  Gnome and I will likely be parting company in the coming
years.

> And I have been using Unix since 1996, and I don't care about what
> *nix "long traditions" are. I want a Linux system that works from my
> cellphone to my big iron server, and everything in between. I don't
> even care about *BSD; I don't wish them any ill, but I don't care
> about them.

You can't have a single Linux which works equally well on all these
disparate systems.  Equally badly, perhaps.  Look at the problems which
MS Windows-8 is having, and it only tries desktops/laptops and 'phones.

> If you don't agree with that, that's fine; but if a big enough set of
> developers thinks similarly, several projects will move in that
> direction. It's already happening.

Yes.  I doubt it will end prettily.

[ .... ]

> and then the only required dependency for systemd will be Linux.

> Man, that will be a nice day.

Will you still be able to configure your system as you wish, though?

> Regards.
> --
> Canek Peláez Valdés

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> Hi, Canek.
>
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 02:09:46PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi Alan.
>
>> > On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:02:38PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> >> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:29 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>> >> [snip]
>
>> > Anytime a free software project drops support for something, it
>> > forces its users to make choices.  Yes, force.
>
>> I don't think that's true, since we are not paying anyone to do the
>> work (well, at least for sure I'm not paying anyone to do anything).
>> They (the developers) don't owe us *anything*.
>
> In a sense, no.  But in another very important sense, yes.  Without that
> sense of duty, of obligation, on the part of developers over the last few
> decades, GNU, Linux, X, BSD, ... would scarcely rate as more than toys.

That's your subjective analysis. I would say the reason is because the
developers took the technically correct decisions.

> [ ..... ]
>
>> If you want to get into morals, this will become a religious argument,
>> and sorry but I'm not interested in that.
>
> Fair enough!
>
>> > The prime one is to support their users.
>
>> No; the prime one is to do their jobs. Most of them are employed by
>> several of the available Open Source supporting companies; their
>> responsibilities is to do the job they are being paid to do. If they
>> are hobbyist, then their prime "responsibility" is to do whatever the
>> hell they want to (and gets accepted in a community project).
>
> Again, fair enough.  But that's just as "religious" a viewpoint as my
> own.

O yeah? Ask the ones that need to pay the rent.

>> >  You'll surely have noticed that what gets up the
>> > noses of people on this mailing list most is when support for reasonable
>> > configurations gets dropped.  Witness all the recent trouble over eth0,
>> > for example.
>
>> What problem? I use NetworkManager in desktop and laptop; there is no
>> problem there. I read the instructions in my media center and servers:
>> no problems there. I don't particularly like the new funny names, but
>> I don't write the code, and the fruits from it I get for free, so I
>> don't complain about it.
>
> Some Gentooers had problems over this change.  I didn't have "problems"
> as such, but the time spent not having these problems could, I feel, have
> been better spent.
>
>> > If you were serious about this exponential growth, how on earth could,
>> > e.g., the Linux kernel or Emacs, both with thousands of options[*],
>> > possibly get tested anywhere near acceptably?
>
>> > [*] 12,666 in Linux 3.7.10, 7,510 in vanilla Emacs 24.3.
>
>> Because they have enough integration testers. They have enough
>> interested users to do the required testing; the kernel and Emacs is
>> oriented towards technical apt users. The stated goal of the GNOME
>> project is that even my grandmother could use it.
>
> I understand what you're saying.  In the limit, this tight integration
> will lead to a system barely capable of being customised.  It will be as
> inflexible as MS Windows always has been.  Will your GM want to use such
> a system?

I sure hope so. I don't see"inflexibility". I see "set a stack where
the best option is chosen by the ones writing the code".

> [ .... ]
>
>> > What about the needs of those high-end audio users, for example, who need
>> > jack?
>
>> There are several success stories about mixing PA with Jack; you can
>> Google them. I don't see the problem.
>
> I'm not an expert on jack, but I gather it's high-endedness implies very
> low latency, for example.  Feeding a signal through pulseaudio as well
> would negate the whole purpose of jack.  Maybe.

I think (I could be wrong) that you can piggyback PA from JACK (so
JACK has the control). That was what I understood.

>> > What about those, like me, with audio problems, where the need exists to
>> > strip a system down so as to isolate those problems?
>
>> As I said below: if PA has problems, they need to be fixed. Did you
>> report the bugs?
>
> I don't even know where the bug is.  It's somewhere in my audio.  It
> might be in Firefox 17.0.5.  It might be in pulseaudio, though having
> been able to remove it, I doubt it.  It might be in ALSA.  My point is,
> in a tightly integrated system, my chances of fixing the problem would be
> that much slimmer.  I don't experience the problem in my fossilised mdev
> system from last summer.

Well, that helps. And that the problem: with loose integrated systems,
a lot of people tend to "fix" things by actually workarounding them,
so the real problem (a bug in ALSA, PA, or the aps) gets unfixed. We
need to zero in the real bugs and *fix them*. It's not your
responsibility to fix the problem; but (and specially if you believe
in "moral obligations") reporting the bugs is.

>> >> 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.
>
>> > pulseaudio is a server component - gnome is an application.  They are at
>> > different levels of the system hierarchy, just as a mail transport agent
>> > and mail user agent are.  The maintainers of mutt don't force the use of,
>> > say, postfix.  By long tradition on *nix, sysadmins configure their own
>> > systems, selecting those components which best fit their needs.  gnome's
>> > decision to mandate pulseaudio interferes with this tradition.  IMAO,
>> > this is a Bad Thing.
>
>> GNOME is a desktop environment, and it wants (from some years now) a
>> vertical integration from kernel to the last userspace application. I
>> root for that.
>
> That would probably be an environment I couldn't configure to work the
> way I want.  Gnome and I will likely be parting company in the coming
> years.

That's your prerogative, of course.

>> And I have been using Unix since 1996, and I don't care about what
>> *nix "long traditions" are. I want a Linux system that works from my
>> cellphone to my big iron server, and everything in between. I don't
>> even care about *BSD; I don't wish them any ill, but I don't care
>> about them.
>
> You can't have a single Linux which works equally well on all these
> disparate systems.  Equally badly, perhaps.  Look at the problems which
> MS Windows-8 is having, and it only tries desktops/laptops and 'phones.

I don't think that way; I think an unified system can run in all the
hardware spectrum. We will know in a few years.

>> If you don't agree with that, that's fine; but if a big enough set of
>> developers thinks similarly, several projects will move in that
>> direction. It's already happening.
>
> Yes.  I doubt it will end prettily.

I'm sure it will be awesome.

> [ .... ]
>
>> and then the only required dependency for systemd will be Linux.
>
>> Man, that will be a nice day.
>
> Will you still be able to configure your system as you wish, though?

As long as *you* do the customization, and don't expect that your
distro do it for you, yeah sure. That will be always possible.

The code is out there.

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 2:38 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> WADR, that is simply false.  With features which interact chaotically
> with eachother, yes, you have exponential growth.  With distinct,
> self-contained features, each one is merely an incremental test effort.
> ALSA and pulseaudio are self-contained, and are also well tested in their
> own right.  Only integration needs testing.
>
> If you were serious about this exponential growth, how on earth could,
> e.g., the Linux kernel or Emacs, both with thousands of options[*],
> possibly get tested anywhere near acceptably?

I just have to point out that this is a misunderstanding. Neither
Linux nor Emacs get the whole shebang of complete formal testing of
all code paths. What they have is an informal "let the users
participate in the beta", which is basically the _opposite_ of
testing. (Well yes, we also use the English word "testing" to describe
what's happening, but it means something else).

That GNOME has a different opinion on their approach to testing such
things is their opinion. After all, they're a _desktop environment_,
and their users are _regular users_, they have an entirely different
dynamic on beta testing from, oh I don't know, an OS kernel.

>> 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.
>
> Making minor changes to free software is impracticable on a casual basis.
> Only forking a project can do this.  You know this full well.
BULLSHIT.

_EVERY_ _MAJOR_ _DISTRIBUTION_ DOES THIS. ALL THE TIME. Even Gentoo.

Heck, the whole point of ebuilds is to make this easy to do.

Case on point. For more than 5 years now, team wine has been
stubbornly refusing to ship a pulseaudio plugin, even when there was
wiiiide clamor within its userbase for one and 2 maintainers
voluntarily stepped up with out of tree patches. Said out of tree
patches have made their way into every major distro. And eventually,
wine team wine bit the bullet and admitted they should have.

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495

Take a look at the files/ subdir of almost every ebuild you have and
you'll notice that there are patches in it.

--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [ ] up to you  [x] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> the
> solution (in the GNOME developers view) is not to "remove PA", since
> the goal of the project is to cover *ALL* use cases.

I don't know the details of the pulseaudio implementation but I have a
hunch the problem boils down to blind arrogance and ignorance on the
part of the roots of the project.

Initially Lennart thought it truly would suit all including pro
audio users and as he has apparently stated he thinks all systems should
run dbus...endof. Knowing a bit about pro audio myself with my Dad
building his first Class A/B amp in his twenties it is not just
feasible but close to a guarantee that Lennart did not realise what
level of detail goes into pro audio including analysing cd players to
find they add timing issues and the windows mixer found to cause real
damage and need bypassing just like pulseaudio needs switching off
(windows being worse however). It is actually very easy to bypass on
Windows though, you just install whatever mixer comes with your pro
sound card driver.

There is nothing wrong with mis understanding the depth proaudio goes
to. The problem is coders should expect their software to be
replaceable and code with that in mind with the added benefit of
competition being good especially in a free software ecosystem where one
of the plusses has been avoiding user entrapment to make money.

As for Desktop distros, they make an understandable choice of PA by
default but what I especially don't understand and demonstrates the
dependency issue is getting much worse is why removing polkit on Ubuntu
means you lose.

KDE
Steam-launcher
nvidia-settings
pulseaudio
many many more..

All of which would function just fine and in most cases perfectly via
sudo.

Polkit tries to do two things well and fails at the second which sudo
does very well indeed, unfortunately many developers don't seem to
understand that.

Pulseaudio, well I am not sure if it is the design of pulseaudio and
lack of utilising universal interfaces or the programs that use it such
as Gnome and the packagers setting dependencies badly. Perhaps if
packagers were more careful there would be less work for Gentoo in
trying to give users choice and more reason for Gnome not to depend upon
a package.


-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> > the
> > solution (in the GNOME developers view) is not to "remove PA", since
> > the goal of the project is to cover *ALL* use cases.  
> 
> I don't know the details of the pulseaudio implementation but I have a
> hunch the problem boils down to blind arrogance and ignorance on the
> part of the roots of the project.


When trying to hunt down a thread to let a guy on the OpenBSD list
know about Gnome 3.8 hard deps on pulseaudio. I came across this
sarcasm about a comment by Lennart from a fairly prominent dev that
adds to the idea of arrogance and ignorance possibly being a
contributing factor.

________________________________________________________________________

Lennart is a funny, funny man, go check the avahi code to see how nice
it is.

"When working on Avahi I learned a lot about the complexities of safely
and reliably running and maintaining system services, and about
securing them as much as possible, which is particularly important for
network facing services like Avahi. I implemented a lot of
pretty nifty features in 
this area in Avahi. For example, Avahi is still pretty much
the *only daemon* on a standard Linux install that chroot()s
itself by default."
_______________________________________________________________________

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 09:38:26PM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote
> 
> When trying to hunt down a thread to let a guy on the OpenBSD list
> know about Gnome 3.8 hard deps on pulseaudio. I came across this
> sarcasm about a comment by Lennart from a fairly prominent dev that
> adds to the idea of arrogance and ignorance possibly being a
> contributing factor.
> 
> ________________________________________________________________________
> 
> Lennart is a funny, funny man, go check the avahi code to see how nice
> it is.
> 
> "When working on Avahi I learned a lot about the complexities of safely
> and reliably running and maintaining system services, and about
> securing them as much as possible, which is particularly important for
> network facing services like Avahi. I implemented a lot of
> pretty nifty features in 
> this area in Avahi. For example, Avahi is still pretty much
> the *only daemon* on a standard Linux install that chroot()s
> itself by default."
> _______________________________________________________________________

  I have 2 questions regarding software development...
1) Is the Linux Foundation paying Steve Ballmer to destroy Windows?
2) Is Microsoft paying Lennart Poettering and Redhat to destroy Linux?
They both seem to be trying their hardest.

  In addition to systemd/pulseadio/avahi, he and Sievers proposed a
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/11/23/1733236/secure-syslog-replacement-proposed
binary-format syslog.  The flak they got was so fierce that even
Redhat's influence couldn't push it through.

  We know what we Gentoo users think of Lennart.  What does he think of
us?  See http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2009/06/0191.html

> So what does that mean for you?

> If you don't do RT development or doing RT development only for
> embedded cases, or if you are a
> Gentoo-Build-It-All-Myself-Because-It-Is-So-Much-Faster-And-Need-To-Reinvent-The-Wheel-Daily-And-Configurating-Things-Is-Awesome-Guy
> then it doesn't mean anything for you. 

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>   We know what we Gentoo users think of Lennart.

Speak for yourself, Walter. Many Gentoo users, like me and many others
than don't participate in the shouting contest this list sometimes is,
don't think bad of Lennart, and we happily use the projects where he
participates. Like the kernel, for example.

Please don't talk like you represent anyone but yourself.

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 12:29 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> 'evening, Mark.
>
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:41:01PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
>> > In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is for
>> > me on my computers.
>
>> Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread,
>> though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to
>> think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally
>> installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100%
>> of the users being "forced" to have pulseaudio in?
>
> 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.

If you don't like it, don't upgrade. Or fork it. Complain if the older
ebuild gets taken out of the tree. Form a community that doesn't like
it and maintain the older one. Use one of the variants that don't have
it as a default. Use XFCE. Use mate. Use some minimal tiling window
manager. Use cinnamon. Patch it so that it doesn't need it. Wait for
someone to supply an ebuild that has a patch (do you know just how
many custom patches gentoo has? A _LOT_) that allows you to disable
it. Wait for someone to supply a PPA that has a patch that has it
disabled. Pay someone to maintain such a ppa. Find another hobby
besides building customized systems that you don't customize.

You have a TON of choices that don't involve turning the GNOME team
into your unpaid slave labor.

Here's what I predict. Every time I google "gnome 3.8 required
pulseaudio", I just get circular references to this thread. The damned
rumor hasn't even been confirmed. Whatever.

If true, 3.8 is going to cause a wildly popular uproar to maintain a
nopulse patch which will be enabled in the 3.8 ebuilds and maintained
by the poor Gentoo gnome team. Gnome won't accept it, but Gentoo will
ship it, and you don't have to do Jack to get it running. You won't
even buy the maintainers a beer for the effort.

If false - oh wait, Gnome 3.8 is already working on openbsd, so it's
got to be false. Or is that another out of tree patch? Whatever. The
GNOME team still remains evil oppressors who take the choice away from
everyone. Because of a rumor you guys started.

> It was me that started this thread, and me that needed that info.  Why
> do you have to be so disparaging about the process of learning?

Disparaging about the process of learning?

Take a good look at my first entry in this thread. A simple suggestion
on a simple technical question. The more I read it the more obvious it
becomes to me that some of the participants are more interested in a
ricing contest with other distros than, say, learning what pulseaudio
does. Case in point: I flat out told you two things it does and you
acted like you were still waiting for an answer.

Here, let me repeat myself in case you really are interested in learning.

>> It's a sane idea for a desktop distro to include pulse as a -default-.
>> No, seriously, it is. Just, frigging bluetooth headsets.
>
> Do you frig bluetooth headsets?  Can't say I do.
>

Bluetooth headsets are a damned good reason to default pulseaudio for
-desktop oriented systems-.

>> And per-application volume control.

Per application volume control is a damned good reason to default
pulseaudio for -desktop oriented systems-.

Oh but you still don't have to... Yeah, I also answered that already.

>> Are there other ways to go about
>> it?  Yeah. It remains to be seen how any of them are an order of
>> magnitude better than pulse. You don't -like- it? Fine. There's no
>> point in going on on some tirade about how the poor, oppressed 99% of
>> users could have been doing just fine with ALSA

And the hilarious thing is it turns out that whatever was causing your
problem wasn't even pulseaudio to begin with. It was just a convenient
scapegoat since bashing Lennart is so goddamned fashionable nowadays.

--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [ ] up to you  [x] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

On 26.04.2013 19:41, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
>> In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is for
>> me on my computers.
>
> Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread,
> though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to
> think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally
> installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100%
> of the users being "forced" to have pulseaudio in?

Yes, being.
I don't know if Lennart writes great code (doesn't seem like that 
though) but what I can see is that he never asks what people need. He 
forces his self-righteous software upon us as a sole alternative. 
Instead of first creating (at least talking over) protocols which are 
(no need to explain why) better, he creates a proggy which aims to be 
all-powerful all-solving (including adobe flash's bugs) and probably to 
conquer all the world.
I don't know again. That's the impression. Maybe there's one who knows 
better. But AFAICT all (really) great software talks protocols and 
standards. In Lennart's works, I don't see any.
And that said, yes, I'm being forced. Gradually it all goes for us all 
to have to have his works installed everywhere. Someone's justifying 
this by "the needs of 1% users", the other one by "the ease to maintain 
one library instead of a lot", the next one by it being brand new -- 
regardless. It's kinda mass psychosis. Whatever you say if not "it's 
great", you get: "oh, again you with your criticism of lennart"? "I have 
*** installed and it works, and you are kinda dumb yourself" etc.
It doubtlessly greatly assists in inclining my point of view towards 
installing lennart's stuff, yeah.

-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
> On 26.04.2013 19:41, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is
>>> for
>>> me on my computers.
>>
>>
>> Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread,
>> though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to
>> think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally
>> installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100%
>> of the users being "forced" to have pulseaudio in?
>
>
> Yes, being.
> I don't know if Lennart writes great code (doesn't seem like that though)
> but what I can see is that he never asks what people need. He forces his
> self-righteous software upon us as a sole alternative. Instead of first
> creating (at least talking over) protocols which are (no need to explain
> why) better, he creates a proggy which aims to be all-powerful all-solving
> (including adobe flash's bugs) and probably to conquer all the world.
> I don't know again. That's the impression. Maybe there's one who knows
> better. But AFAICT all (really) great software talks protocols and
> standards. In Lennart's works, I don't see any.
> And that said, yes, I'm being forced. Gradually it all goes for us all to
> have to have his works installed everywhere. Someone's justifying this by
> "the needs of 1% users", the other one by "the ease to maintain one library
> instead of a lot", the next one by it being brand new -- regardless. It's
> kinda mass psychosis. Whatever you say if not "it's great", you get: "oh,
> again you with your criticism of lennart"? "I have *** installed and it
> works, and you are kinda dumb yourself" etc.
> It doubtlessly greatly assists in inclining my point of view towards
> installing lennart's stuff, yeah.

You do realize that Lennart hasn't been the maintainer of PulseAudio
since *BEFORE* the 1.0 release? And that now it has in fact many
contributors, and they just released 3.0 in December and are getting
ready to release 4.0? And that systemd/udev has dozens of
contributors, from (basically) all the distributions, and that several
of them are kernel developers?

You may not like the *design* of the stuff, but you certainly can't
complaint about the *quality* of it.

You are not being forced to anything: in the worst case you can patch
all the programs you use, the code is out there.

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

On 26.04.2013 22:25, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
[ snip ]
> You do realize that Lennart hasn't been the maintainer of PulseAudio
> since *BEFORE* the 1.0 release? And that now it has in fact many
> contributors, and they just released 3.0 in December and are getting
> ready to release 4.0? And that systemd/udev has dozens of
> contributors, from (basically) all the distributions, and that several
> of them are kernel developers?

Just the same way as Linus is the person of the kernel, and BG is the 
person of Microsoft, and Moscow is the capital of Russia (don't you take 
literally smth like "Moscow agreed to Washington's terms"), we probably 
do not speak of personalities or capitals but there is of course some 
connection and responsibility on their behalf.

> You may not like the *design* of the stuff, but you certainly can't
> complaint about the *quality* of it.

How can quality be apart of design? What do you then mean by quality? 
Quality of bytes and indentation and comments?

> You are not being forced to anything: in the worst case you can patch
> all the programs you use, the code is out there.

Thanks, it really doesn't look like forcing.
On the higher level, there must be some politics going on; that's also 
not forcing, but politics. On the lower level (that of users) one's 
always got the worst case to demonstrate there's no forcing. But why not 
go "the best case"? It's a big mistake to think that developing software 
is about writing code; NO! it's about communication. What is your 
software usable for except its users' usage? Ask users and try to do 
what they want. Forcing begins when you the developer start to think 
what users want without asking them, that's why (some) users don't go 
the windows way, the mac way or other ways and NOT the quality or design 
of windows or mac, nor their cost.
Free doesn't just mean you get it for free -- and as if that should be 
the indulgence of the developers; free is (to me) the freedom of 
communication between them and the users, it's what is called the 
community! (As an example, you may notice what's going on around MySQL, 
losing its community; feel free to take the code and patch though, as it 
remains GPL'd and free!)

And when I hear
 > Do you pay them?
I answer, you need money -- why code then? Go to a stock exchange and 
trade, there's quite a bit more money guys. That's what about money.
But if you do your job, please do it with regard to how it is going to 
be used. You agreed to the terms; there was no forcing.
This is the line that must be drawn.
(Similarly, when I'd start to pay, do I buy the right for `all my dreams 
to come true`? Another fair question would be: do I pay *enough*? Who 
pays more?)

It's a neverending talk anyway. Everyone has his own attitude, and 
probably most of us are willing to make the world better, only according 
to one's own perception of "better".

-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 3:51 AM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
> Thanks, it really doesn't look like forcing.
> On the higher level, there must be some politics going on; that's also not
> forcing, but politics. On the lower level (that of users) one's always got
> the worst case to demonstrate there's no forcing. But why not go "the best
> case"? It's a big mistake to think that developing software is about writing
> code; NO! it's about communication.

The arrogance of some posters in this thread is that they think
"because I've never heard of it, it didn't happen". Newsflash, you're
not omniscient.

FACT of the matter is: pulseaudio's purpose was well-communicated by
the original designer. Its adoption by major distributions was openly
announced and widely discussed by the people of the relevant teams.
/run was communicated to and independently agreed on by the teams of
all major distros. /usr's merge and the rationale behind it was
publicly announced. systemd's design documents and documentation are
all out in the open...

Just because you don't like it and avoid "his" blog like plague,
doesn't mean they aren't talking.

Or by communication, do you mean something else? Like "get users to
vote on every color and doodad of the system"? Because that's not how
open source works. Remember Linus' informal title? Benevolent
_Dictator_. Open source does not mean democracy. It simply and exactly
means that you can choose to be free from their control if you wanted.

What more should they do? Go to your house and offer to fix your PC
for you? That's just entitlement.
--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [ ] up to you  [x] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Randy Barlow]

I've been a little surprised at some of the posts in this thread. As
some others have pointed out, I do not believe it is fair to state that
anyone is forcing you to use any particular software (such as
PulseAudio, or udev), as it is your choice to use Linux or not in the
first place. Why do these same people not complain about being "forced"
to use the Linux kernel? After all, it would certainly be tricky to
install Gentoo on metal, and not use the Linux kernel.

As an open source developer and as an open source consumer (and of
course I consume far more open source efforts than I contribute), I
think it is important to keep in mind that we are benefiting from the
generosity of others. I think the idiom, "Don't look a gift horse in the
mouth" is probably appropriate to this discussion.

Another important point that has been said by others that I think is
worth highlighting is that there are many ways to go without using
PulseAudio if you really want ALSA. Gnome happens to depend on it, but
that's the choice of Gnome developers and not us.

I happen to work on an open source server product that requires the use
of MongoDB. There are many community users who complain about that, as
they would rather us use the DB of their preference (PostgreSQL is a
common request). I don't disagree that it would be cool if my project
could use either DB and let the users go with their own choice, but it's
not a priority for us due to the long list of other features and bugs
that we need to deal with. It's so much simpler for us to only support
one database, and so it allows us to deliver a lot of other cool
features instead. I think that is a reasonable decision on our part, and
some of our community members disagree and that's fine. I don't think we
or they feel any animosity about it. It would significantly increase our
QE and development costs if we were to support other DBs. I think Gnome
and PA can be thought of in a similar light.

I will divulge that I happen to like Gnome and PulseAudio, and so
consider me biased. I did find the /usr thing with udev to be kind of
inconvenient since I did happen to have a separate /usr, but I dealt
with it and am grateful to have a free udev that I can use.

Note that I'm not saying you need to like or use these technologies - I
just ask that you realize that there are pretty good reasons for Gnome
to simplify their dependency list, and that you do still have great
freedom in your software choices. There are many great alternatives to
Gnome. Open Source software is incredible, and I think it's exciting to
think about all the many choices it has brought us so far. Any one of us
could fork any OSS project we wanted at any time and tweak it for what
we want and share with the world. That is really good.

-- 
Randy Barlow

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Dale]

Randy Barlow wrote:
> <<SNIP>>
> I will divulge that I happen to like Gnome and PulseAudio, and so
> consider me biased. I did find the /usr thing with udev to be kind of
> inconvenient since I did happen to have a separate /usr, but I dealt
> with it and am grateful to have a free udev that I can use.
>
> <<SNIP>>

I dealt with udev too.  I switched to something that doesn't force me to
chose having /usr on / or having a init thingy.  Since I switched, I can
have /usr on its own partition and not have a init thingy.  Having
options worked very well.  Not having a option would not have ended as
well for me and others. 

For me, I just didn't like the way udev was going so I, and others,
complained a lot and when someone came up with a better plan, I switched
as I'm sure others did too.  If people that use Gnome don't like
pulseaudio, they should have a option to use something else.  If they
don't have that option, then in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable
for a person to say they don't like it.  If everyone just goes along and
doesn't say anything, then people that can make a option won't know one
is needed to begin with . 

I shortened the above but since you mentioned using windoze instead of
Linux, that is not a option here.  I'll donate money/time or whatever I
can to Linux but I will NOT pay for a OS that is even half as crappy as
windoze.  I have never bought anything M$ and have no plans to ever do
it either.  It just is not a option for me.  I have family/friends that
use windoze and that is about all I can stand.  Actually, I switched my
brother about a year ago.  I switched him to Kubuntu but it still beats
the stuffins out of windoze. 

Just my $0.02 worth. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Randy Barlow]

On Sat, 2013-04-27 at 15:13 -0500, Dale wrote:
> I dealt with udev too.  I switched to something that doesn't force me to
> chose having /usr on / or having a init thingy.  Since I switched, I can
> have /usr on its own partition and not have a init thingy.  Having
> options worked very well.  Not having a option would not have ended as
> well for me and others.

Yeah, this is the great thing about Open Source!

> For me, I just didn't like the way udev was going so I, and others,
> complained a lot and when someone came up with a better plan, I switched
> as I'm sure others did too.  If people that use Gnome don't like
> pulseaudio, they should have a option to use something else.  If they
> don't have that option, then in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable
> for a person to say they don't like it.  If everyone just goes along and
> doesn't say anything, then people that can make a option won't know one
> is needed to begin with.

I think it's fine to not like something and to say so. However, there is
a line between respectfully requesting features, and complaining about
something that someone is giving you for free (hence my gift horse
reference). I don't intend this last sentence to read harshly, or
intended as a personal attack against anyone. I'm just sharing how the
mood of some posts on this thread feels to someone who is an Open Source
developer.

The word "force" is not appropriate to be used in the context of Open
Source software. We all have the freedom to choose any number of
alternatives to Gnome or udev (including already existing forks and
derivatives). Force more often involves men with guns (or Darth Vader).

The project that I work on does not "force" you to use MongoDB. However,
if you wish you make use of my project in the way it was intended to be
used without modifications, you will need to use MongoDB. It's a hard
dependency. Nobody is forcing you to use my project, and there are
alternatives you can choose from. You also have the freedom to git clone
us, and change it to use SQLite, or MariaDB, or PostgreSQL, or anything
else you like (however, if you use LDAP as a database, I know someone
who might hunt you down!) By the nature of us giving you the code with
an Open Source license (GPL), it's freedom for you, not force.

> I shortened the above but since you mentioned using windoze instead of
> Linux, that is not a option here.  I'll donate money/time or whatever I
> can to Linux but I will NOT pay for a OS that is even half as crappy as
> windoze.  I have never bought anything M$ and have no plans to ever do
> it either.  It just is not a option for me.  I have family/friends that
> use windoze and that is about all I can stand.  Actually, I switched my
> brother about a year ago.  I switched him to Kubuntu but it still beats
> the stuffins out of windoze. 

I think you may be thinking of someone else. I don't recall having ever
mentioned The Evil OS®. I too have been using Linux exclusively for a
fairly long while :)

-- 
Randy Barlow

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 28/04/2013 02:24, Randy Barlow wrote:
> The project that I work on does not "force" you to use MongoDB. However,
> if you wish you make use of my project in the way it was intended to be
> used without modifications, you will need to use MongoDB. It's a hard
> dependency. Nobody is forcing you to use my project, and there are
> alternatives you can choose from. You also have the freedom to git clone
> us, and change it to use SQLite, or MariaDB, or PostgreSQL, or anything
> else you like (however, if you use LDAP as a database, I know someone
> who might hunt you down!) By the nature of us giving you the code with
> an Open Source license (GPL), it's freedom for you, not force.

This paragraph highlights the essential difference.

You don't say what your project is, but reading between the lines I
think it's safe to assume it's a somewhat niche project with specific
goals that solves a specific problem, right?

Such projects come with their dep list as you pointed out and this only
affects the machines that project runs on. In eight years hanging out on
this list I don't recall any cases of users complaining about deps of
projects in such a class.

What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.

That is a whole different kettle of fish entirely and is interpreted
very differently from what your project does, this is the point where
the analogies break down. Regardless of how similar two things may
appear on technical merit, the reaction of users is always the deciding
factor.

udev rules changed network names for all recently updated Linux machines
everywhere.
Separate /usr caused changes to many machines not using an initrd, and
will continue to do that for all time.
systemd changes how sysadmins start and shutdown their machines, and how
that works for every service on the host whether the sysadmin likes it
or not.
PA makes deep changes to how the machines handles sound, and the user
for the most part never agreed to have those changes. The user agreed to
use Gnome and the change came in from left field unexpected.

With your project, the user knows upfront they will need MongoDB, they
make an informed decision about this before ever emerging your code at
all. So your analogy doesn't really hold true. A much better analogy
would be if your project used MySQL and one day you required them to
upgrade to Oracle (and not the free one either...). Plus, you don't
really give them a choice - you also say that all support for all
currently released versions will end in 6-12 months. You are giving the
*apparency* of choice, whilst creating the *reality* of no (or very
little) choice. Does this not look to you a lot like lock-in?


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Randy Barlow]

On Sun, 2013-04-28 at 11:59 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> You don't say what your project is, but reading between the lines I
> think it's safe to assume it's a somewhat niche project with specific
> goals that solves a specific problem, right?

This is true (I almost typed True. That's what happens when you code 8
days a week.)

> Such projects come with their dep list as you pointed out and this only
> affects the machines that project runs on. In eight years hanging out on
> this list I don't recall any cases of users complaining about deps of
> projects in such a class.
> 
> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
> affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
> ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.

Well, this will be the case if nobody forks these projects, or writes
competing projects. As Dale has pointed out, there already is eudev. For
systemd, you have OpenRC as an alternative. For Pulse, you can just use
a different DE. I understand that you don't like the direction that
these projects are going, and I'm not attempting to convince you to like
or use them. I'm just trying to point out that there are viable
alternatives.

Perhaps you are concerned that Gentoo will require these technologies?
That might happen, I don't know one way or the other. If it does,
there's always the possibility of forking Gentoo itself (there are
already a handful of Gentoo derivatives.)

> That is a whole different kettle of fish entirely and is interpreted
> very differently from what your project does, this is the point where
> the analogies break down. Regardless of how similar two things may
> appear on technical merit, the reaction of users is always the deciding
> factor.

Fair enough.

> udev rules changed network names for all recently updated Linux machines
> everywhere.
> Separate /usr caused changes to many machines not using an initrd, and
> will continue to do that for all time.
> systemd changes how sysadmins start and shutdown their machines, and how
> that works for every service on the host whether the sysadmin likes it
> or not.
> PA makes deep changes to how the machines handles sound, and the user
> for the most part never agreed to have those changes. The user agreed to
> use Gnome and the change came in from left field unexpected.

Yeah, I fully understand why you don't like these. I don't fully like
them either, to be honest. I too experienced some inconveniences during
my upgrades, particularly around udev. However, in my case, I'm willing
to accept it. For you, there are alternatives.

> With your project, the user knows upfront they will need MongoDB, they
> make an informed decision about this before ever emerging your code at
> all. So your analogy doesn't really hold true. A much better analogy
> would be if your project used MySQL and one day you required them to
> upgrade to Oracle (and not the free one either...). Plus, you don't
> really give them a choice - you also say that all support for all
> currently released versions will end in 6-12 months. You are giving the
> *apparency* of choice, whilst creating the *reality* of no (or very
> little) choice. Does this not look to you a lot like lock-in?

Yeah, I think I understand more where you are coming from. And I do see
how my project is different. My project is unlikely to be installed by
default on all the major Linux distributions, so there's no worry that
we will be bringing MongoDB to be on each distribution.

I just want people to focus on the fact that there is still choice. You
are not alone in your dislike for these technologies, and for you there
are options. Yeah, maybe you will be using a technology that is only
used by a minority, but we're all used to that on this list, right? :)

-- 
Randy Barlow

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

Randy,

I don't want to continue rehashing the whole thread, as you and I are
essentially in agreement.

I do want to take this opportunity to highlight something we techies
overlook almost all the time:

We are human, and humans are not logical. We do not run on bash scripts
and don't have a CPU in our heads. Sheldon and Spock are fiction :-)

We humans run on emotion and the fuzzy-feel-good chemicals we squirt
into our brains, and techies are probably the worst equipped to spot
when it kicks in! And so:

On 28/04/2013 18:02, Randy Barlow wrote:
>> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
>> > affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
>> > ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.
> Well, this will be the case if nobody forks these projects, or writes
> competing projects. As Dale has pointed out, there already is eudev. For
> systemd, you have OpenRC as an alternative. For Pulse, you can just use
> a different DE. I understand that you don't like the direction that
> these projects are going, and I'm not attempting to convince you to like
> or use them. I'm just trying to point out that there are viable
> alternatives.

It's easier to whinge, moan, complain and insist that devs rollback the
latest change than go through all the effort of running a fork. But it's
not always about what the dev wants. A good dev will listen to what his
users desire and incorporate that into his planning, this too seems to
be hardwired to a degree in our brains.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/04/2013 02:24, Randy Barlow wrote:
>> The project that I work on does not "force" you to use MongoDB. However,
>> if you wish you make use of my project in the way it was intended to be
>> used without modifications, you will need to use MongoDB. It's a hard
>> dependency. Nobody is forcing you to use my project, and there are
>> alternatives you can choose from. You also have the freedom to git clone
>> us, and change it to use SQLite, or MariaDB, or PostgreSQL, or anything
>> else you like (however, if you use LDAP as a database, I know someone
>> who might hunt you down!) By the nature of us giving you the code with
>> an Open Source license (GPL), it's freedom for you, not force.
>
> This paragraph highlights the essential difference.
>
> You don't say what your project is, but reading between the lines I
> think it's safe to assume it's a somewhat niche project with specific
> goals that solves a specific problem, right?
>
> Such projects come with their dep list as you pointed out and this only
> affects the machines that project runs on. In eight years hanging out on
> this list I don't recall any cases of users complaining about deps of
> projects in such a class.

The problem is that they (mostly) only complain. If they stepped in,
they could take care of the (alleged) issue.

And, BTW, in ten years of hanging out on this list I recall *many* a
occasion where users complained about basically everything. I recall a
user that had "USE=-mysql" and complained that wordpress (or another
similar webapp) still pulled in MySQL.

But even if it's really worse now than in whatever number of years you
want to recall, if they only complain then is basically useless.

> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
> affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
> ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.

The source is out there NOW AND IN THE FUTURE. If there is enough
developers interested in maintaining something, it will be maintained;
but you cannot force no developer to maintain nothing.

You (and others) can complain about the choices of some developers;
but you cannot force them to do the things the way you want to.

> That is a whole different kettle of fish entirely and is interpreted
> very differently from what your project does, this is the point where
> the analogies break down. Regardless of how similar two things may
> appear on technical merit, the reaction of users is always the deciding
> factor.

With all due respect, BS. The deciding factor is what the developers
choose to do, and (secondarily) if enough users are interested (and
*CAPABLE*) enough of taking care of the situation and stepping in to
do a fork or some similar alternative.

Free software works as a meritocracy; no matter how badly (or loudly)
a group of users react, if they don't back up their complaining with
code, it doesn't really matters. And this is true even if the
complaining users is a "majority" (which, BTW, we don't really know if
that's the case).

> udev rules changed network names for all recently updated Linux machines
> everywhere.

And in most distributions most users will not even notice. And if they
do, the can stop updating udev. Or switch to eudev, or to mdev, or to
a static dev tree. And if they really really care, they can step in
and code a solution: the code is out there.

> Separate /usr caused changes to many machines not using an initrd, and
> will continue to do that for all time.

And many of us actually believe that is a good idea, and it seems that
is faster to boot with an initrd than without:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/108087225644395745666/posts/H9CFBQLG8S8

But if you don't believe is a good idea, go and use OpenRC. Or
Upstart. Or step in and code a solution.

> systemd changes how sysadmins start and shutdown their machines, and how
> that works for every service on the host whether the sysadmin likes it
> or not.

They can keep maintaining SysV/Upstart/OpenRC if they really care.
Otherwise, the benefits of using systemd outweighs the (small)
inconvenience of learning something new.

> PA makes deep changes to how the machines handles sound, and the user
> for the most part never agreed to have those changes. The user agreed to
> use Gnome and the change came in from left field unexpected.

He can switch to KDE, or XCFE, or Enlightment. Or he can use MATE or
Cinnamon. Or he can step in and code the necessary to use GNOME
without PA.

He cannot (and he will not) force any developer to do anything the
developer doesn't want to do.

> With your project, the user knows upfront they will need MongoDB, they
> make an informed decision about this before ever emerging your code at
> all. So your analogy doesn't really hold true. A much better analogy
> would be if your project used MySQL and one day you required them to
> upgrade to Oracle (and not the free one either...).

That analogy makes no sense whatsoever. All the projects you don't
agree with (systemd/udev, PulseAudio, GNOME, etc.) are Free Software.
How can you compare them with Oracle "(and not the free one
either...)"

The code is OUT THERE. It will be *always*. Even if Randy's project
switched to Oracle, since it is Free Software his users could take the
code and keep using MySQL.

> Plus, you don't
> really give them a choice - you also say that all support for all
> currently released versions will end in 6-12 months. You are giving the
> *apparency* of choice, whilst creating the *reality* of no (or very
> little) choice. Does this not look to you a lot like lock-in?

No is not, because the code is there for *anyone* to do something if
they are capable and willing enough.

We are circling the same arguments here; you don't like the decisions
some projects take and how they affect their issues. In your view, the
developers have to do things your way since you (or other users) are
using their projects.

You are plainly wrong, and the proof of that is that many developers
in the Linux stack (from kernel to user applications, passing through
distributions including Gentoo) are simply not listening to users like
yourself. And that many users (like me) support them.

You may not like that; but arguing here (or any other place) will not
change it. Only people doing the coding get to have a say in the
matter.

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

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 28/04/2013 18:11, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
>> > affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
>> > ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.
> The source is out there NOW AND IN THE FUTURE. If there is enough
> developers interested in maintaining something, it will be maintained;
> but you cannot force no developer to maintain nothing.

You keep saying this, over and over in many places for many reasons.

But it just is not true.

It's easy to get a dev to support something - you just ask them.

Have you ever asked a dev to support something you needed?

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: Text/Plain, Size: 1575 bytes --]

On Sunday 28 Apr 2013 18:12:49 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 28/04/2013 18:11, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> >> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
> >> 
> >> > affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it
> >> > ON ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.
> > 
> > The source is out there NOW AND IN THE FUTURE. If there is enough
> > developers interested in maintaining something, it will be maintained;
> > but you cannot force no developer to maintain nothing.
> 
> You keep saying this, over and over in many places for many reasons.
> 
> But it just is not true.
> 
> It's easy to get a dev to support something - you just ask them.
> 
> Have you ever asked a dev to support something you needed?


Egocentric/maniac devs just listen to their own infallible desires, which 
*they* call logic rather than the requests of their users.

In such cases, those of us who have neither the capability nor the time to 
start coding the next fork which complies better with *nix design principles 
and common sense, have to wait for some sensible solution to appear (e.g. 
eudev) and run with that where available.

Ultimately, if some other dev(s) create /better/ code than Poettering that 
closer matches the desires of many, I expect the monolithic 
initrd+udev+systemd+what-ever will be ditched in favour of something more 
flexible that suits a lot of us Gentoo users.

I can't wait for this to happen sooner, but since I can't code I can only but 
hope.  :-)

-- 
Regards,
Mick

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part. --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 490 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/04/2013 18:11, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>>> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
>>> > affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
>>> > ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.
>> The source is out there NOW AND IN THE FUTURE. If there is enough
>> developers interested in maintaining something, it will be maintained;
>> but you cannot force no developer to maintain nothing.
>
> You keep saying this, over and over in many places for many reasons.
>
> But it just is not true.
>
> It's easy to get a dev to support something - you just ask them.
>
> Have you ever asked a dev to support something you needed?

Yes of course; you can ask a developer for anything: you can ask him,
for example, to throw himself over a cliff. Believe me: he will
probably not do it.

I said: you cannot *FORCE* a developer to maintain nothing. You want
to *FORCE* them to support PA-less systems (in the case of GNOME,
perhaps, in the future) and /usr-separated systems without initramfs
(in udev case), only because *you* think is the right thing to do, or
because it was previously "supported" (in the /usr-separated it was
actually a problem waiting to happen).

The developers in those projects made their choice: make yours. Stick
with those projects and accept that the developers word is law; or
contribute so that your word has weight; or fork the project; or
switch projects; or whatever. Complaining over choices already made by
the people in charge is not very productive.

Of course you can express your opinion. But without any code behind
it, the most probably outcome is that it will be ignored.

Even more in a place like this list: some Gentoo developers read
gentoo-user, and from those even less are upstream in certain
projects. But the majority of the people writing the code (the kernel,
systemd-udev, PulseAudio, GStreamer, GNOME,
whatever-application-you-use) most of the time don't read this list.

Complaining here about PulseAudio being a hard dependency on GNOME is
basically yelling into an echo chamber: you will most of the time get
only responses from people with the same opinion as yours, and they
all will get into a long rant about the evils of who-knows-what new
fangled project that goes against "old Unix principles" (whatever that
is). And. Nothing. Will. Change... because the people coding the code
are the ones making the decisions. And they do not read (in general)
this particular mailing list.

The developers in several projects are making their decisions;
sometimes they listen to users, sometimes they don't. If we don't step
in and contribute code to said projects, arguing here about what
constitutes a "good" or a "bad" developer is pretty pointless.

To finish (this mail and my participation in this thread), you know
what developer is famous for not listening to users? Linus Torvalds.
Google what has happened whenever someone has tried to set up a
petition campaign to get something into the kernel.

And he's certainly one of the best project leaders we have.
--
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 04:34:03PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote

> YES it is entirely about a few megabytes you don't like. A few
> megabytes that OTHER people choose to put on THEIR computers to NO
> effect on yours. Even your sig betrays your bias.

  I don't go around telling other people what religion / politics /
OS libs / etc they should use.  I don't really care about soft defaults
since I run with USE='-*".  But when unnecessary stuff is made into a
*HARD WIRED DEOENDANCY*, I draw the line.  What I fear is that if there
is no yelling/screaming *NOW*, then stuff like systemd/pulseaudio/dbus
etc will eventually become mandatory.  At one point I was one of only a
few people on this list *NOT* using HAL.  BTW, those of you who have pam
and dbus masked out, like me, please raise your hand.

  Speaking of dbus, my latest issue is with gnumeric spreadsheet, of all
things.  It seems that they're switching from gconf to GSettings, which
apparently requires dbus.  See
https://developer.gnome.org/gio/unstable/tools.html  I ran into this
with the latest update of gnumeric.  A couple of additional menu bars
show up, which pushes the bottom of graphs and spreadsheets off the
bottom of the screen.  I can hide them each time I open the spreadsheet
but they reappear next time I open the sheet.  And while I'm at it, why
does gnumeric-1.12.0-r1 now require ghostscript?  I am seriously
considering switching to openoffice.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 25/04/2013 17:48, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
>> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
>> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
>> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
>> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
>> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
>> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
>>
>>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
>> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
>> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
>> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
>> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
> 
> The "complexity" overhead of pulseaudio is vaaastly overstated here.



And you are vastly overstating the desirability of having pulseaudio
enforced on users without very good cause and seem to have
underestimated how deep that rabbit hole goes.

As others have stated, how many more such packages are there that can be
argued to have them on a system? A good first grab would be the number
of packages where the users are >=1% and <=99%

"It does no harm and might be useful for some" is simply not a valid
reason to enforce a package on all users, especially when said package
is the latest johnny-come-lately from a wunderkind with a proven
reputation for writing invasive code[1] and where the package in
question is merely the most recent between 4 valid choices, all of which
accomplish the basic action.

The world out there is always vastly more complex than you imagine and
your[2] system, or all systems of which you have knowledge, can never be
considered representative. What is good for you is seldom good for all.

I'm not rejecting pulseaudio. It solves a problem that exists and for
those that need it PA is a boon. I'm saying that there is no cause for
making PA mandatory, or even for having any sound capabilities on a
desktop machine at all.

[1] "invasive" here means "invasive", it does not imply good, bad,
indifferent or any other description of quality. Merely that Poetering's
code is invasive and disruptive.

[2] "you" here can just as easily mean "any one of the 7 billion humans
we've created so far"



> 
> Yes, as a general principle, adding unneeded complexity is bad. But that takes
> into account general ideas on the relative tradeoffs of having it there or not.
> But listen to the happy PA users here who don't feel any problem with their
> setup. The complexity doesn't bite them.
> 
> Analogy:
> 99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point of installing it
> by default on most desktop systems is that you can't predict who will need it,
> and _it does not harm_ (or very little harm) to the people who don't.
> 
> So your tradeoffs are:
> A) no a11y unless elected by user:
> - for the 1%: a11y is a pain to install because the user might not
> even be able to see the screen (very big pain)
> - for the 99% use a few megabytes less on their disk. (very small gain)
> 
> B) a11y for everyone unless elected removed:
> - for the 1%: they can use the system properly (no pain)
> - for the 99%: use a few megabytes more on their disk (very small pain)
> 
> Obviously (B) is a better default choice. Ditto pulseaudio.
> --
> This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
> Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no
> Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none
> 


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:55 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> And you are vastly overstating the desirability of having pulseaudio
> enforced on users without very good cause
How much barefaced lying can you do in one sentence?
1) it's not enforced _on you_. USE=-pulse
2) bluetooth headset goes in, audio goes out is good cause.

> and seem to have
> underestimated how deep that rabbit hole goes.
No I haven't. I have no idea how deep the complexity of pulseaudio is
because I don't know how to use it. I don't know how to use it because
it just works. Somewhere, somehow at the back of these config files
there was some switch I turned on for some nefarious purpose of
enabling some plugin for switching default outputs. But if I compare
how well I learned to use grub vs pulseaudio, two things that I use
everyday, it's clear that one of them was more successful in hiding
the complexity from me before I used it successfully. HINT: it wasn't
grub.

> As others have stated, how many more such packages are there that can be
> argued to have them on a system? A good first grab would be the number
> of packages where the users are >=1% and <=99%
You can argue those packages if you wish and I guarantee you'll fail
99.9% of them. Because they don't serve the purpose of controlling
PLUG N PLAY AUDIO.

If you actually talk like it matters what the programs do, rather than
just making airy abstractions on what some ideal fetishized system
should be like, you'll understand things better.

> "It does no harm and might be useful for some" is simply not a valid
> reason to enforce a package on all users, especially when said package
> is the latest johnny-come-lately from a wunderkind with a proven
> reputation for writing invasive code[1]
Oh dear. I should've realized what this was really about. There aren't
really any technical reasons behind this, are there? Just some good
old fashioned Lennart hate boners.

I have a perfect halloween campfire story for this group. The one
where a malicious udev update gives a backdoor for He Who Must Not Be
Named to install his LennartWare onto yor systems...

Later guys.

--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [x] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 26/04/2013 10:50, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>> "It does no harm and might be useful for some" is simply not a valid
>> > reason to enforce a package on all users, especially when said package
>> > is the latest johnny-come-lately from a wunderkind with a proven
>> > reputation for writing invasive code[1]
> Oh dear. I should've realized what this was really about. There aren't
> really any technical reasons behind this, are there? Just some good
> old fashioned Lennart hate boners.
> 
> I have a perfect halloween campfire story for this group. The one
> where a malicious udev update gives a backdoor for He Who Must Not Be
> Named to install his LennartWare onto yor systems...


You missed the mark completely and your bias appears to be showing.

You have no idea what I might consider this to be "really about". And
it's highly presumptuous of you to make the assumption you did.



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

[gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Steven J. Long]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 04:50:43PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:55 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> > And you are vastly overstating the desirability of having pulseaudio
> > enforced on users without very good cause
> How much barefaced lying can you do in one sentence?
> 1) it's not enforced _on you_. USE=-pulse

Not enforced on Gentoo, no, which is why many of us use it. But we're discussing
pulseaudio in the wider ecosystem (you certainly are) which does affect us too.

> 2) bluetooth headset goes in, audio goes out is good cause.

Yeah and if you need it all power to you: look you can install it real simply
or it comes by default on some distros. What about the rest of us who either
don't give a damn about audio beyond the speakers on our computer, with hifi
TV et al separate, or are actually into quality audio, and use jack?

See: you cannot predict the use-cases. By definition, you will not be present
when the software is run by the end-user. So you have to learn humility, and
let the user decide. Hence what was said before about software not imposing
itself, especially when not in even use.

One True Way inturgrated idiot-box crap doesn't allow that. It's the antithesis
of Unix. And if you can't deal with the fact that Linux is a *nix, use something
else instead of imposing layers of crap on the rest of us. Especially your dud
spangly new ideas that are turds you want the rest of us to polish while you
sell your "enterprise" distro based on everyone else's work. It's poisoning
the software ecosystem.

> > and seem to have
> > underestimated how deep that rabbit hole goes.
> No I haven't. I have no idea how deep the complexity of pulseaudio is
> because I don't know how to use it. I don't know how to use it because
> it just works.
<snip>
> But if I compare
> how well I learned to use grub vs pulseaudio, two things that I use
> everyday, it's clear that one of them was more successful in hiding
> the complexity from me before I used it successfully. HINT: it wasn't
> grub.

Funny, I spent even less time learning to use the KDE artsd and it worked
too. I never had any problems with it at all, yet I've heard of a lot
of issues with pa, more worryingly to do with the mentality the "developer"
imposes as a condition of working with him. I still got rid of it, and am
much happier with my current, Lennartware-free, setup thanks.

Must be something about "what programs actually do, rather than just"
misleading analogies and invalid comparisons.
 
> If you actually talk like it matters what the programs do, rather than
> just making airy abstractions on what some ideal fetishized system
> should be like, you'll understand things better.
> 
> > "It does no harm and might be useful for some" is simply not a valid
> > reason to enforce a package on all users, especially when said package
> > is the latest johnny-come-lately from a wunderkind with a proven
> > reputation for writing invasive code[1]
> Oh dear. I should've realized what this was really about. There aren't
> really any technical reasons behind this, are there? Just some good
> old fashioned Lennart hate boners.
> 
> I have a perfect halloween campfire story for this group. The one
> where a malicious udev update gives a backdoor for He Who Must Not Be
> Named to install his LennartWare onto yor systems...

Newsflash: it's called "systemd" and you can't get udev without it.

Nor can you build udev separately, you must install all the requirements
and build the full systemd package: they deliberately broke that. Even
though systemd has nothing to do with udev: it's a complete layering
violation.

They have nfc about what "not breaking userspace" means. They tried to
push binary logfiles in the kernel; they broke module-loading and blamed
it on everyone else; and they designed a system with a race builtin, despite
claiming loud and wide that they are the "experts in the dynamic early
userspace domain". Oh and let's not forget the wonderful decision to use
XML in system space, plus the current nonsense about hw bus-ids being stable.

But sure, these amateurs are just who we want writing system-critical
code..

Smart businesses won't be so dumb. Nor will smart users. Good luck to the
rest of you, you have my sympathy: I see your pain on IRC every day.

-- 
#friendly-coders -- We're friendly, but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 04:50:43PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:55 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> > And you are vastly overstating the desirability of having pulseaudio
> > enforced on users without very good cause
> How much barefaced lying can you do in one sentence?
> 1) it's not enforced _on you_. USE=-pulse

  Tell that to GNOME users as of v3.8.  My sig takes on more meaning,

> 2) bluetooth headset goes in, audio goes out is good cause.

  For users of bluetooth headsets, maybe.  But, not for desktop users who
suddenly start experiencing audio problems.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> Hello, Gentoo.
>
> I've just removed pulseaudio from my main Gentoo system.  Why?  Several
> reasons:
>
> (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
> it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
> between sound applications and the kernel.

Take a look at this:

https://plus.google.com/photos/115256116066287398549/albums/5778609034682831121/5778849461325756466

That's me selecting with a click of the mouse if I want to use Skype
with the analog speakers from my laptop, or with my bluetooth headset.
Of course, the BT headset doesn't appear in the combo box until they
are actually connected; my USB speakers don't show up there because
they weren't connected.

With PA, I can switch soundcards for programs individually, without
the program in questing noticing at all: you have your sound coming
from the laptop speakers, and after selecting my BT headset, the sound
starts coming out from them, all instantaneously.  No config files
editing required, everything "just works".

And of course all the other sound applications just keep working, and
the sound for them it's routed to the laptop speakers, but I can also
change them on the fly to go to my BT headset, or my USB speakers, or
even other machines using PA connected in my LAN (with proper
permissions).

You can probably do all of this without PA, but it will require to
edit $HOME/.asoundrc, and files under /etc/bluetooth/, and probably
testing different configurations for permissions, and...

And I just don't care. PA just works, in all my machines and media
center. And it's all very nicely integrated with GNOME and it just
works with a couple clicks from my mouse (if at all).

So if you don't need it, good for you that you can remove PA from your
system. For the *general case* (not necessarily the *most used*, but
the one that covers the *most* use cases), PA is the best solution
available. And all the distributions seems to agree on that.

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

[gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[James]

Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko <at> gmail.com> writes:


>
https://plus.google.com/photos/115256116066287398549/
albums/5778609034682831121/5778849461325756466

> 
> And I just don't care. PA just works, in all my machines and media
> center. And it's all very nicely integrated with GNOME and it just
> works with a couple clicks from my mouse (if at all).


What about KDE? I do not see a gui interface for pulseaudio?

I did find the files under /etc/pulse.

A gui interface to pulseAudio for KDE?


Another question. Can the installation of PulseAudio and Jack
coexist? Doable or a constant nightmare?

curiously,
James

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Karl Lindén]

2013/4/19 James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com>:
> Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
> Another question. Can the installation of PulseAudio and Jack
> coexist? Doable or a constant nightmare?
>
Yes, they sure can coexist. I haven't found it completely optimal
always, but here is some info.

I currently run both PA and JACK side by side, but on different sound
cards. However, I can get PA to send audio into JACK and vice versa by
manually starting JACK through QJackCtl; the PA plugin is not
initialized otherwise. This works fine but it can be a little CPU
hungry if I have many inputs/outputs.

As I mentioned, PA is running "on top of" JACK. I do not know if the
opposite is as easy (haven't yet tested), but I guess you could just
start JACK with the "dummy" driver and let the PA plugin do the trick.

Also, make sure PA does not take over the card you want to use with
JACK. Otherwise JACK will complain. It can be disabled through
pavucontrol.

Kind regards,
Karl

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> Another question. Can the installation of PulseAudio and Jack
> coexist? Doable or a constant nightmare?

There seems to be a a package to allow pulse to utilise jack. However
if you are using jack for the high quality audio benefit then
apparently you have to kill pulseaudio even if it means making a dummy
package on binary distros to fool the system into thinking it is
installed and so not removing lots.

I suggested he use Gentoo but I think he saw it as too much work.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

[gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[James]

Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists <at> yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> 
> > Another question. Can the installation of PulseAudio and Jack
> > coexist? Doable or a constant nightmare?
> 
> There seems to be a a package to allow pulse to utilise jack. However
> if you are using jack for the high quality audio benefit then
> apparently you have to kill pulseaudio even if it means making a dummy
> package on binary distros to fool the system into thinking it is
> installed and so not removing lots.

What I suspected.... timing (latency) increases that from my
experiments are sporadic and too unpredictable. jack alone
works best.

 
> I suggested he use Gentoo but I think he saw it as too much work.

(comment for me?)
All I use is gentoo or embedded (state machines) on embeddded hardware. My
target is jack on embedded gentoo, but, I've run into resource limitations,
so I'm waiting on my new Arm15 dev board in May.....

Thanks,
James

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Removing pulseaudio

[Kevin Chadwick]

> > I suggested he use Gentoo but I think he saw it as too much work.  
> 
> (comment for me?)
> All I use is gentoo or embedded (state machines) on embeddded hardware. My
> target is jack on embedded gentoo, but, I've run into resource limitations,
> so I'm waiting on my new Arm15 dev board in May.....

> > > > Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
> > > > scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
> > > > udev...)  

>>> Of course from many threads from a pro audio user called Ralf, Gentoo
>>> users and so a fraction of Linux users are the only ones lucky enough
>>> to be able to do that *easily* whilst keeping packages they want,
>>> especially Gnome ones!

Ralf, Sorry. I should be more careful in what I write but I am in the
middle of a few things.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

Am 19.04.2013 15:43, schrieb Canek Peláez Valdés:

> Take a look at this:
> 
> https://plus.google.com/photos/115256116066287398549/albums/5778609034682831121/5778849461325756466
> 
> That's me selecting with a click of the mouse if I want to use Skype
> with the analog speakers from my laptop, or with my bluetooth headset.
> Of course, the BT headset doesn't appear in the combo box until they
> are actually connected; my USB speakers don't show up there because
> they weren't connected.

Yeah, I get the picture ... but:

I never got my BT-headset working with Skype correctly.

Either the sound was OK and the mic didn't work or the sound was crappy
and the mic *seemed* to work (looking at the graphs) but I never heard
my recorded voice in the Skype Test Call.

OK, maybe that's a skype-issue and not PA-related ... anyway.

Annoying.

S

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat 20 Apr 2013 04:36:34 AM PHT, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> Am 19.04.2013 15:43, schrieb Canek Peláez Valdés:
>
>> Take a look at this:
>>
>> https://plus.google.com/photos/115256116066287398549/albums/5778609034682831121/5778849461325756466
>>
>> That's me selecting with a click of the mouse if I want to use Skype
>> with the analog speakers from my laptop, or with my bluetooth headset.
>> Of course, the BT headset doesn't appear in the combo box until they
>> are actually connected; my USB speakers don't show up there because
>> they weren't connected.
>
> Yeah, I get the picture ... but:
>
> I never got my BT-headset working with Skype correctly.
>
> Either the sound was OK and the mic didn't work or the sound was crappy
> and the mic *seemed* to work (looking at the graphs) but I never heard
> my recorded voice in the Skype Test Call.

Many bluetooth headsets have 2 modes of operation. There's a telephony 
mode, which allows for audio in and out, and there's a high quality 
audio mode, which only allows audio out. Very likely that you need to 
set the playback to telephony mode to get it working. At least if your 
headset has an actual mic.

Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

Am 19.04.2013 23:06, schrieb Mark David Dumlao:

> Many bluetooth headsets have 2 modes of operation. There's a telephony 
> mode, which allows for audio in and out, and there's a high quality 
> audio mode, which only allows audio out. Very likely that you need to 
> set the playback to telephony mode to get it working. At least if your 
> headset has an actual mic.

Yes, that is the correct direction! I figured that out already in a way
... but even in telephony mode things somehow stuck.

The headset works fine with my android devices, even as telephone
headset with the smartphone, so basically the "in and out" should work fine.

Maybe I just don't get it  and it's a question of moving (some of those
dozens of) sliders in the PA-settings ... even IF that is the case this
is way too un-intuitive, not-working-out-of-the-box IMO.

In the end there are only 2 sliders relevant:

in and out related to the headset. If both are selected,
activated/un-muted and their volume is around 100% I should be able to
record and hear my voice, right?

Stefan