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

[Castedo Ellerman]

On 11/7/21 13:12, Rafael Laboissière wrote:
> Praat in Debian can perfectly record sounds from the microphone 
> without the libasound2-plugins package installed. Of course, a sound 
> card is needed for that.
>
> At any rate, it would be convenient to be able to do recordings in the 
> corner case that you describe (i.e. without sound card but with a 
> PulseAudio domain socket available).
>
> However, I dislike the idea of forcing the dependency on 
> libasound2-plugins. Do you think that Suggests would be enough?

Putting libasound2-plugins only in Suggests sounds reasonable to me. I 
think the right choice depends on whether one thinks PulseAudio is the 
ideal universal interface for application to access audio and 
applications should avoid directly accessing lower level interfaces like 
ALSA and /dev/snd. I have not been following the progress of sound 
interfaces in Linux very much, but I suspect it's not clear PulseAudio 
is the audio interface that everybody will adopt and should start using. 
I see there is also JACK, GStreamer and PipeWire which also sound like 
high level audio interfaces for applications.