Re: use of Recommends by vlc to force users to use pipewire
On 2022-05-27 12:34:26 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> If vlc-plugin-pipewire is prioritized higher than other audio backends,
> then I can see how that could happen. It's probably premature for
> vlc-plugin-pipewire to be prioritized higher than PulseAudio or ALSA in
> Debian.
>
> The dependency graph around this stuff is complicated, particularly in
> a distribution like Debian where the answer to "do we try to support A
> or B?" is always "yes". Some early-adopter distributions have switched
> to Pipewire as their preferred audio service, replacing PulseAudio,
> and in *those* distributions, it would make sense to prioritize
> vlc-plugin-pipewire ahead of other audio backends - but Pipewire was not
> sufficiently mature to replace PulseAudio in bullseye, and it remains
> to be seen whether it will be sufficiently mature to replace PulseAudio
> in bookworm.
>
> If Pipewire was only an audio service, then the right thing to do would be
> to make sure it was completely optional and not pulled in by depenencies,
> but it's a video service too, and during a global pandemic with a lot of
> people working and socializing remotely, not having working screen-sharing
> or screencasting in GNOME/KDE (together with not having working webcams
> in sandboxed Flatpak/Snap apps) seemed like a sufficiently major issue
> to make Pipewire worth the headaches it can cause.
So I suppose that the solution should be that PulseAudio have the
priority over Pipewire.
> > and apparently ditto with ogg123 (via ALSA, which I had as the default)
>
> I don't know why that would be. The Pipewire module for libasound is in
> pipewire-audio-client-libraries, which nothing depends on.
It has never been installed.
> Could it be the case that the chain of Recommends pulled in wireplumber
> (which Recommends pipewire-pulse) instead of the preferred alternative
> pipewire-media-session (which was not always listed first, see #999363),
> resulting in pipewire-pulse taking over audio routing from PulseAudio?
The wireplumber package was installed from 2021-10-26 to 2021-10-29
only. So, perhaps ogg123 was using something else. But the ogg123
audio stream was not appearing in pavucontrol, and the sound was
sent to the speaker of my laptop instead of the bluetooth speakers.
> > However, for the support of bluetooth devices, libspa-0.2-bluetooth
> > is needed, but it isn't even pulled when pipewire is installed!
>
> That's needed for Bluetooth audio, *if* you are using Pipewire for audio,
> which (as a distribution) we are not yet aiming to do. It isn't needed
> (or useful) if you are only using Pipewire as a video multiplexer.
The issue appeared automatically with the upgrade of the vlc package.
> pipewire-pulse should probably have a Recommends on libspa-0.2-bluetooth,
> if people consider Bluetooth audio to be sufficiently important to
> justify that (of course, every critical feature for one user is considered
> "bloat" by someone else, so we can't win). pipewire probably shouldn't,
> until such time as we are ready to recommend Pipewire as a replacement
> for PulseAudio.
So why did Sebastian Ramacher reassign bug 1011035 to pipewire?
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1011035#22
> > But xdg-desktop-portal just depends
> > on the libpipewire-0.3-0 library package. If it needs more than
> > the library, then I suppose that it should also recommend pipewire
> > directly and not expect that the library will do it.
>
> Perhaps. If I add that Recommends, how many angry bug reports are we
> going to get accusing me of forcing people to use Pipewire against
> their will?
Fewer: This is already an issue because xdg-desktop-portal depends
on libpipewire-0.3-0, which recommends pipewire. The advantage would
be that packages just depending on libpipewire-0.3-0 would not pull
pipewire. So, this would solve the pipewire issue in some cases.
Said otherwise, this would not change anything for xdg-desktop-portal,
but could improve things for other packages (if xdg-desktop-portal and
other packages pulling pipewire are not installed).
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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