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@×××.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).