[LAU] Diagnosing JACK

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 9 Oct 2015 10:47:15 +0000, Kaza Kore wrote:
>Generally PEOPLE don't install PulseAudio, rather it is installed by
>default as an integral part to most Linux distributions these days and
>there is no option not to have it installed and you can not even
>remove it! So why have a bitch about something which isn't a user
>choice and I know full well you are aware of that fact!

That's at best a half-truth. Bloated software for no reasons makes
pulseaudio a hard dependency, that easily could be resolved by an empty
dummy package.

Pulseaudio is useful for some people, but it often is the source of
trouble for users who want to make audio productions.

However, even if you install Ubuntu without bloated software you
neither need pulseaudio, nor a dummy package that fakes to provide
pulseaudio.

Just in case I installed a dummy package, but for demonstration I'll
remove it and you'll see that even Ubuntu doesn't need pusleaudio, let
alone Arch Linux:

  [root at archlinux rocketmouse]# systemd-nspawn -qD /mnt/moonstudio 
  [root at moonstudio ~]# cat /etc/issue
  Ubuntu Wily Werewolf (development branch) \n \l

  [root at moonstudio ~]# dpkg -l pulseaudio
  ii  pulseaudio             2015:09-06-moons all           Dummypackage
  
  [root at moonstudio ~]# apt-get remove pulseaudio Reading package
  lists... Done Building dependency tree       
  Reading state information... Done
  The following packages will be REMOVED:
    pulseaudio
  0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  After this operation, 9216 B disk space will be freed.
  Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
  (Reading database ... 227898 files and directories currently
  installed.) Removing pulseaudio (2015:09-06-moonstudio) ...

Absolutely nothing requires pulseaudio. This Ubuntu install does miss
nothing, it has got openbox and jwm installed, qupzilla and icecat,
roxterm, spacefm and rodent, claws mail, qjackctl and jack2, gimp,
pluma, engrampa etc.. IOW all that GUI stuff users usually want, if they
prefer GUI over command line. I don't feel the need to install the
pulseaudio dummy package, because I even can't imagine that some
software I will install will have got a hard dependency to pulseaudio.
Without a dummy package I perhaps need to read what will get
installed, if I don't make usage of the "--no-install-recommends"
option. For a few packages pulseaudio perhaps is an optional
dependency, that by some Debian/Ubuntu packages might be a recommended
dependency.

What requires pulseaudio on your Linux installs? What distros are you
using? Ubuntu and Arch don't require it!

Regards,
Ralf