Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)

[Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de>]

Hi there,

Am 2017-06-06 15:55, schrieb Adam Borowski:
> pulseaudio: xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
> * BAD: I want working sound, duh.

I know there's a faction of people out there who absolutely despise
PulseAudio, and that they constantly have problems with it. But,
as a request collective to all of you that fall into this category:
could you please stop with these snide remarks?

There are other people out here, such as myself, who are really
glad for PulseAudio, and that have never experienced their sound
not to work at all with PA. (Before Jessie I did run into some
issues on some combinations of hardware and software, but all were
solvable, and in the end I was always able to run the configuration
I wanted.)

Now I'm not writing that to try to convince you about PA, and I
don't doubt that you've apparently had trouble with it. And I don't
have a dog in this fight really because I'm not really attached to
PA: if something better comes along in the future, I'd be very
happy to switch. However, what these kind of snide remarks do is
to poison the discussion atmosphere.

To give you an example where I don't like a bit of software: I
really don't like GNOME. But I don't make a habit of going around
and dropping snide remarks such as "I want a usable desktop" [*],
especially in generic discussions. I think this is very counter-
productive.

Or to look at it from this perspective: what I find troubling
here is the apparent lack of recognition that people other than
you might see actual advantages in PA. These kind of remarks come
across as quite condescending to all the people who've looked at
the same software and come to a different conclusion.

Regards,
Christian

PS: Btw. you're objecting to a package with 'pulseaudio' in its
    name to recommend the pulseaudio package itself? I think
    that this Recommends is a prime example for something that
    really makes sense here. In this case the recommends is
    fully justified anyway, because the XFCE4 maintainers have
    apparently decided that PA should be used by default on
    XFCE4 desktops, which is why xfce4 (meta package) Depends:
    on xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin.

    So in the end, if you don't like PA, then you have two
    options here:

      a. Accept the fact that PA is installed by default on
         XFCE4 desktops, be glad that the dependency from the
         XFCE4 plugin to PA itself is only a Recommends: and
         not a Depends:, and remove the package manually. This
         is what Recommends: is for, after all.

       - or -

      b. Convince the XFCE4 people to not make use of PA in the
         default install.

    But the Recommends: relationship between the plugin and PA
    itself makes perfect sense here.

[*] Which, btw. I would never say about GNOME regardless,
    because while I don't like a lot of things they've done, I
    wouldn't call it "unusable".