Re: Sound problems (mpd, mpv mainly)
On 06/04/17 07:45, Ric Moore wrote privately to me with a question about
how my previous remarks made sense.
Here's my public answer.
First, the dependency bill could be considerably more than 111kB,
because while pavucontrol is itself only 111kB, it also requires the
Pango font handling library, the Cairo drawing library, the GTK+
windowing library, the GLib utility library, the Canberra event sounds
library, and the ATK accessibility interface library, none of which are
dependencies of pulseaudio.
The average GUI user wouldn't be bothered by that, since they've
probably got all of those libraries dragged in by application software,
but not all use cases for pulseaudio require a GUI in the first place (I
might be running it on my headless home media server), and some GUI
users treat their GUI as just a way to have lots of xterms on screen at
once.
Second, pulseaudio Depends: pulseaudio-utils, meaning that any Debian
system with pulseaudio installed will have pacmd (an interactive
terminal-oriented program for submitting commands to a pulseaudio
server) and pactl (a non-interactive program for submitting commands to
a pulseaudio server) available. These are inconvenient for your
particular use case, but they are sufficient to make pulseaudio functional.
Thus, suggesting that "pulseaudio Suggests: pavucontrol" should become
"pulseaudio Recommends: pavucontrol" would be entirely reasonable, since
a very common set of pulseaudio use cases are vastly more convenient
with pavucontrol installed, but suggesting that it should become
"pulseaudio Depends: pavucontrol" would not.
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