[LAU] Assumed you want to remove pulseaudio - Was: Diagnosing JACK

[Ralf Mardorf]

It's off-topic for the original thread and might confuse the OP of this
thread, so I opened a new one.

If somebody wants to get rid of pulseaudio, without recompiling,
without dummy packages, then it doesn't harm to test if software really
needs pulseaudio.

On Sat, 10 Oct 2015 05:32:43 +0000 (UTC), fred wrote:
> De : Ralf, Envoyé le : Samedi 10 octobre 2015 1h39
>>For me it's easier to just install one sound server instead of two or
>>more sound servers. I don't need to comment out something or to add
>>something to an app. For most use cases it's simpler to use one sound
>>server.
>
> That's because you have the technical ability to do it Ralf!>> For
> most of "simple users" installing distros "as it comes", you just
> finish with 'killall pulseaudio' before starting Jack,>> and it
> works right :)

My Ubuntu install has zero dependencies to pulseaudio. Since I test a
lot with my Arch Linux install I need a dummy package to fulfil hard
dependencies for cinnamon and vice. There are 4 optional dependencies.

Even if I would like to use Cinnamon, I couldn't, because it requires
an absurd fast graphics. Using the "radeon" driver Google Earth is fast
as lightning, but Cinnamon is nearly unresponsive. Vice is an emulator I
just planed to test, but I never did, IOW assumed recompiling without
pulseaudio or just installing a dummy package, as I did, wouldn't work,
I could simply remove this software [1].

If users anyway suspend/kill pulseaudio and dummy packages work too,
then why is it a hard dependency for some software?
Why not using simply software that doesn't require pulseaudio?

I'm using openbox, but at least JWM, Xfce4 and Mate are installed too
and seemingly non of them requires pulseaudio.

If you're using a deb based distro, make a dry-run to test, if there
really is needed software that depends on pulseaudio [2].

IMO Ubuntu and Debian aren't distro for power-users or geeks only.

[1]
[rocketmouse at archlinux lib]$ cd /bin/;du -sh
1.2G	.
[rocketmouse at archlinux bin]$ cd /lib/;sudo du -sh
5.2G	.
[rocketmouse at archlinux lib]$ sudo pacman -R pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa
vice cinnamon-settings-daemon cinnamon-control-center cinnamon checking
dependencies... :: fluidsynth optionally requires pulseaudio:
PulseAudio sound support :: phonon-qt4 optionally requires pulseaudio:
PulseAudio support :: phonon-qt5 optionally requires pulseaudio:
PulseAudio support :: speech-dispatcher optionally requires pulseaudio:
PulseAudio support

Packages (6) cinnamon-2.6.13-3  cinnamon-control-center-2.6.0-1
cinnamon-settings-daemon-2.6.3-1 pulseaudio-2013.08.18-1
pulseaudio-alsa-2-3  vice-2.4-7

Total Removed Size:  51.37 MiB

:: Do you want to remove these packages? [Y/n] n
[rocketmouse at archlinux lib]$ grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep -v
"#" Driver      "radeon"

[2]
[root at moonstudio ~]# apt-get purge --dry-run 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.
Purg pulseaudio [2015:09-06-moonstudio]