[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#998754: praat: libasound2-plugins package needed to record in praat

[Castedo Ellerman]

Package: praat
Version: 6.1.38-1
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: castedo at castedo.com

Dear Maintainer,

The praat package does not list libasound2-plugins as a dependency. But in
order to record sounds in an environment with PulseAudio, I believe it is
required. The libasound2-plugins package contains a plugin for:
  'pulse: play or capture via Pulse Audio'.

When installing praat (bullseye) inside a container, I discovered that it was
necessary to also install the libasound2-plugins package in order for recording
of sound to work in praat.

This is unusual environment: a Linux (docker) container with no sound card but
with a PulseAudio domain socket available. Perhaps the responsibility is on the
user of such an environment to make sure that libasound2-plugins is already
installed. On the other hand, praat does take advantage of the plugin installed
by libasound2-plugins and this makes possible recording functionality that
otherwise does not work (albeit a corner case environment).

I'm happy to provide more details on the container environment.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.1
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-305.25.1.el8_4.x86_64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: unable to detect

Versions of packages praat depends on:
ii  libasound2           1.2.4-1.1
ii  libc6                2.31-13+deb11u2
ii  libcairo2            1.16.0-5
ii  libgcc-s1            10.2.1-6
ii  libglib2.0-0         2.66.8-1
ii  libgtk-3-0           3.24.24-4
ii  libpango-1.0-0       1.46.2-3
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0  1.46.2-3
ii  libpulse0            14.2-2
ii  libstdc++6           10.2.1-6
ii  libx11-6             2:1.7.2-1
ii  oss-compat           7
ii  python3              3.9.2-3

praat recommends no packages.

praat suggests no packages.

-- debconf information excluded