Bug#627083: "recommends: jackd" is a bit weak

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 17:03:08 (CEST), IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> in short:
> - a lot of audio-packages have jack support and thus depend on libjack
> - installing libjack does not mean that jackd _must_ be installed (great, i like
>   weak dependencies)
> - however, installing libjack will not trigger an installation of jackd (due to
>   the _very_ weak dependency), thus most installations will end up without jackd
>   installed (that was the purpose of #442814)
> - if the user wants to use the jack-enabled application (which they installed
>   using apt), it will not work in most of these installations as jack cannot be
>   started, giving a cryptic error (e.g. "/usr/bin/jackd not found"), leaving the
>   use alone

This sounds like the bug that should be fixed.

As a counter example, take mplayer, which has a very broad userbase of
which not everyone wants to run jackd. Still they require libjack
installed because otherwise the binary would not be usable at all.

Therefore the right thing to do is to make sure that applications fail
gracefully in case the daaemon is not running or installed.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4