Dear community,
Many people are annoyed by PulseAudio.
Recent examples:
forums.freebsd.org
forums.freebsd.org
Two ports in particular recently added PulseAudio to the default options:
audio/alsa-plugins which is a direct dependency of www/qt5-webengine and therefore indirectly required by Falkon, Qutebrowser, Konqueror, KMail, Amarok, MuseScore, ...
accessibility/speech-dispatcher which is a direct dependency of www/chromium and accessibility/qt5-speech and therefore indirectly required by most of KDE software (including Plasma destop), Linphone, FreeCAD, ...
As a result, lots of people ended up with PulseAudio added in a recent
I emailed the maintainer of alsa-plugins about this, who replied it's not fair to let PulseAudio users rebuild everything in order to get things working. That's a good argument, but annoying all other pkg users by pushing Poetterware they don't need neither want on their systems and which may break audio setup is not fair either. We need a solution which is acceptable for both sides.
For this particular port, he suggested that it could be split in smaller ones. That's probably the way to do, and this is true for other ports too. For example x11-wm/lxqt-panel, which pulls PulseAudio because its built-in audio volume applet needs it. If this applet were made a separate port, like audio/xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, installing LXQt wouldn't require PulseAudio anymore and nobody would be wronged in the move.
I'd like to do something to fix these problems and have lots of time available. The problem is: I don't know how to split a port. Your help is welcome.
Many people are annoyed by PulseAudio.
Recent examples:
![forums.freebsd.org](https://forums.freebsd.org/styles/freebsd/xenforo/logo.og.png)
Other - Looking to setup a desktop environment that doesn't need Pulseaudio
I was getting ready to install kde or xfce when I noticed they pulled in pulseaudio. I remember reading how unFreeBSD this was (or something like that) and was trying to figure out how to get either without pulseaudio and without losing volume control on my laptop - unsuccessfully. So, what's a...
![forums.freebsd.org](https://forums.freebsd.org/styles/freebsd/xenforo/logo.og.png)
After upgrading no more audio in firefox
I did pkg upgrade and now I have no audio in firefox. I do have it with chrome, the problem seems to be firefox. Any hint? Thanks
This attitude seem to fade away. Now some widely used ports are being built with PulseAudio support by default and therefore pull PulseAudio automatically when installed from pkg. This is especially problematic because PulseAudio shows the ungentlemanly behaviour of enabling itself without asking once it's installed.Packages are built with the port's default options set. Most of the time Pulseaudio is set to off by default because a lot of people don't like it and it pulls in dependencies they don't want. I would suggest setting up your own package repository, there you can set everything how you want it.
Two ports in particular recently added PulseAudio to the default options:
audio/alsa-plugins which is a direct dependency of www/qt5-webengine and therefore indirectly required by Falkon, Qutebrowser, Konqueror, KMail, Amarok, MuseScore, ...
accessibility/speech-dispatcher which is a direct dependency of www/chromium and accessibility/qt5-speech and therefore indirectly required by most of KDE software (including Plasma destop), Linphone, FreeCAD, ...
As a result, lots of people ended up with PulseAudio added in a recent
pkg upgrade
and automatically enabled, sometimes leading to problems.I emailed the maintainer of alsa-plugins about this, who replied it's not fair to let PulseAudio users rebuild everything in order to get things working. That's a good argument, but annoying all other pkg users by pushing Poetterware they don't need neither want on their systems and which may break audio setup is not fair either. We need a solution which is acceptable for both sides.
For this particular port, he suggested that it could be split in smaller ones. That's probably the way to do, and this is true for other ports too. For example x11-wm/lxqt-panel, which pulls PulseAudio because its built-in audio volume applet needs it. If this applet were made a separate port, like audio/xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, installing LXQt wouldn't require PulseAudio anymore and nobody would be wronged in the move.
I'd like to do something to fix these problems and have lots of time available. The problem is: I don't know how to split a port. Your help is welcome.