Just to clarify a few things...
1) If you only install libpulse, you are not not using pulseaudio. It
is just another "useless" library on your system. You already probably
have plenty of libraries installed on your system that you do not use.
If you really do not want it installed, rebuild the relevant package
using ABS. But given that with its dependencies it takes up a total of
1.17MB on my system it seems an utter waste of time... If you want your
system that clean of unused libraries, look at Gentoo and USE flags.
2) You are not being forced to use pulseaudio. The next GNOME release
will be using pulseaudio by default. That is a decision from the GNOME
developers which we have held off implementing for a couple of releases,
but Arch follows the upstream developers decisions. If you do not want
pulseaudio, pick a better desktop such as XFCE! You are not being
forced to use GNOME or pulseaudio.
3) Any package that does force you to use pulseaudio (beyond installing
libpulse) is probably a bug. All packages so far have been built with
optional pulseaudio support. File bug reports.
4) If you _choose_ to use pulseaudio and run into issues, file a bug
report. We have a fairly vanilla setup, so you can go directly upstream
with your issue or go via our bug tracker if you think the issue may be
Arch specific. Non-specific complaints about bugs get everyone
nowhere. Bug reports FTW.
Regarding #3 and #4, I see maybe one bug report in our tracker about
breakages in pulse and the packages built against it in our tracker. So
I guess congratulations to the developers dealing with this upgrade for
what appears a relatively seemless transition because no-one is having
actual issues... Which leads me to (rhetorically) query why this
thread is so long and filled with "facts" about pulse being broken?
Allan
