Re: use of Recommends by vlc to force users to use pipewire
On 2022-05-28 01:27:13 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 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
If pipewire-pulse is the better place for this relationship, feel free
to reassign it.
Cheers
>
> > > 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/>
> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
>
--
Sebastian Ramacher
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