How avoid installing binary package dependency i dont like?

[Someone]

I tried to install libre office, and among the packages it depends on is pulseaudio. I actively avoid software by pulseaudios author Lennart Poettering, because i think there is malice behind his work, that is used as a trojan horse to take over userspace of FOSS computer systems.
I saw that aside pulseaudio, pipewire is also installed as a dependency. By the way whats is for an audio package dependency in an office application suite?
After i installed libreoffice through repo, and opened it and saw it working, i wanted to uninstall pulseaudio package ONLY.
But FreeBSD pkg says 4 packages to be removed, gstreamer, libreoffice, pulseaudio, qt6-multimedia.
Unneeded or easily replacable packages holding other packages hostage is imo unsavory.
Any workaround to achieve my intended goals about my systems packages? Thanks.

 

[SirDice]

Build from ports (or set up your own custom repository). Then you can disable options to remove certain dependencies. Or enable options you do want.

Package dependencies are basically set in stone, once the package has been created its dependencies cannot be changed.

 

[jwillia3]

I think Hanlon's Razor is applicable to Pulse Audio.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

In the case of Pulse Audio, I don't think he had any particular malicious aspirations. I think he's just a poor developer. systemd and his political manoeuvering of that is a different case entirely.

 

[jwillia3]

If you really don't like a package and don't want to build from source, you can truncate the files to make them inoperable and lock the package.

 

[wolffnx]

builds from ports, the most of the time there is no problem, but should be carefull, like disable ipv6 for example or another dependencies that another installed ports needs

 

[jardows]

You won't necessarily need to build the entirety of libreoffice. If you check the dependences on freshports,
editors/libreoffice does not have pulesaudio as a dependency. I didn't go through all the dependencies, but looking through, multimedia/qt6-multimedia is a required dependency of libreoffice, and that by default includes pulesaudio. So you can install just from ports multimedia/qt6-multimedia, lock that package, then install libreoffice from packages as normal.

Just remember that anytime you update your packages, you will need to re-update your ports tree and and the multimedia/qt6-multimedia port. This is easier if you are fully setup for quarterly, or if like me track latest but only update on a scheduled interval.

EDIT: Just to add for the OP - setup to build qt6-multimedia from ports but not build all the tools, etc: after setting the configuration options in the port to disable pulseaudio, you can then run make install-missing-packages to install everything else by packages. Saves a lot of time.

 

[cracauer@]

sudo rm `which pulseaudio`

 

[eternal_noob]

Even better

pulseaudio.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Poettering sucks\n");
    return 0;
}

gcc -o pulseaudio pulseaudio.c
sudo cp pulseaudio `which pulseaudio`

 

[Alain De Vos]

as a poudriere purist,
make.conf

.if ${.CURDIR:M*/usr/ports/devel/llvm14}
IGNORE= "is geblokkeerd in make.conf"
.endif

#.if ${.CURDIR:M*/usr/ports/lang/gcc12}
#IGNORE= "is geblokkeerd in make.conf"
#.endif

 

[AlfredoLlaquet]

 

[Alain De Vos]

You will use systemd. Or a shim. Like me. If not there is pulse-audio. The ugliness of rc is not done. One must automatic restart a corrupt failing service.
And i have 100.000 of lines of code to do this. Quality of the service is not important, lets restart it , do like nothing happened.

 

[Beastie]

By the way whats is for an audio package dependency in an office application suite?

You can insert multimedia files into documents/spreadsheets. I guess also audio notifications is a possibility.

If you only need a word processor and a spreadsheet editor, may I recommend editors/abiword and math/gnumeric. These are quite good and lighter alternatives to the behemoth OpenOffice/LibreOffice and they have none of the dependencies that are bothering you.

 

[SirDice]

LibreOffice has no direct dependency on PulseAudio.

editors/libreoffice (USE_QT6; multimedia) -> multimedia/qt6-multimedia (PULSEAUDIO=on) -> audio/pulseaudio

 

[mer]

Beastie abiword is still around? I may have to poke at that. I think I still have some original documents in it along with some old Lyx documents.