On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:29 AM, Alan Mackenzie <a...@muc.de> wrote: [snip] > Somebody reported that pulseaudio is an absolute requirement for Gnome >>=3.8. That may not be 100% of users, but the "forced" is certainly > there.
No one is forcing nothing on anyone, since nobody is forcing no one to use GNOME, Gentoo, or Linux for that matter. The developers of any project can always decide the dependencies of a project. If you are not a developer, you simply have no vote in the matter, although you certainly always have voice... that they can choose to ignore. > There's a difference between a "default choice" and an absolute > requirement. Yeah; and the decision is for the developers to make. >> Basically there's a bunch of vague criticisms of unnamed systems where >> "they" force stuff on "all users" for "no good reason". Nevermind that >> we can actually state what the reasons are. Fingers in the ears. >> neener neener. > > Please feel free to state those reasons, which as far as I can see, > nobody has done yet in this thread; "they" being the gnome team, and the > reasons being for the forcing, not for a non-existent "default choice". If GNOME has to support PA and non-pa systems, they need to code, test, support and bug-fix 2 different sets of of systems. If they need to support ConsoleKit and logind, the number grows to 4 (PA/ck, PA/logind, non-PA/ck, non-PA/logind). With 3 different optional requirements, it's 8 sets of systems. With 4, is 16. With n, it's 2^n. That's exponential growth, which in CS is always no-no. Who is going to code, test, support and bug fix all those possible configurations? You? The GNOME developers simply cannot support all different sets of possible configurations, and PA covers the sound needs of *ALL* users (doesn't matter if you like it or not), even the simple cases. If PA has bugs in some configuration, those bugs need to be fixed; the solution (in the GNOME developers view) is not to "remove PA", since the goal of the project is to cover *ALL* use cases. But hey, the source is there; feel free to patch whatever needs to be patched in GNOME (and probably GStreamer) so it doesn't require PA. Just be certain that those patches will be rejected by upstream, for the reasons stated above. And by the way, this is also true for Gentoo: it cannot support all different sets of possible configurations, no matter how hard they/we try. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
