[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1029377: pipewire-pulse: Please remove Recommends: pipewire-alsa

[eeickmeyer at ubuntu.com]

Hi Dylan,

On Tue, 2023-01-24 at 11:02 +0100, Dylan Aïssi wrote:
> Hello Erich,
> 
> Le dim. 22 janv. 2023 à 00:45, Erich Eickmeyer
> <eeickmeyer at ubuntu.com> a écrit :
> > 
> > The introduction of the "Recommends: pipewire-alsa" line in the
> > debian/control
> > file has reintroduced the problem resolved by bug #1020903 in which
> > pipewire-
> > pulse is causing a conflict with pulseaudio, albiet indirectly this
> > time.
> > 
> > As pipewire-pulse is now soft-depending on pipewire-alsa, which
> > does directly
> > conflict with pulseaudio. This is causing a package conflict,
> > especialy when
> > seeded, when pulseaudio is installed and is causing the Ubuntu
> > Studio seed to
> > fail to build.
> > 
> > Ubuntu Studio was intending to include, in their built-in-house
> > Studio Controls
> > utility, a way to easily switch between the traditional
> > Pulseaudio/JACK setup
> > and the Pipewire setup. Unfortunately, this recommends line,
> > however well-
> > intentioned, completely broke that.
> > 
> > My recommendation is to demote pulseaudio-alsa to a Suggests in
> > this case.
> > 
> 
> I removed pipewire-alsa from depends field of pipewire-pulse.
> Instead, I created
> a new metapackage pipewire-audio that depends on a set of pipewire
> packages
> recommended for a standard audio use of pipewire. A large part of bug
> reports
> against pipewire and wireplumber are mainly from users with broken
> config because
> they don't follow/install recommended packages. I guess this new
> package should
> make that clearer.
> 
> I agree that pulseaudio and pipewire-pulse can be installed together
> at same time,
> but for whatever reasons several users have reported conflicts
> between them. And
> it seems easier (at least for standard users of pipewire for audio)
> to
> add a conflict
> between them, but I guess users of Ubuntu Studio don't have a
> standard use of
> pipewire. This brings me to the question, why do you want both
> pulseaudio and
> pipewire-pulse to be co-installable?
> 
> Best regards,
> Dylan

We're planning on having pipewire with pipewire-jack as the default
configuration, but switchable via the enabling/disabling of services
using our built-in-house (but available to all distros) Studio Controls
utility (https://github.com/ovenwerks/studio-controls). The reason for
this is that there's currently no feasible way to bridge JACK to
pipewire, so having the "old school" pulseaudio setup and
starting/stopping JACK on demand as we've done in the past so that
workflows aren't broken and that professional audio users can still get
work done the way they always have.

Unfortunately, the pipewire-jack configuration isn't quite ready for
professional audio, but will work for most users, which is why we need
this particular configuration. Additionally, some Firewire audio aren't
supported under ALSA and require a completely different backend
(FFADO), and pipewire lacks the facility to support those interfaces.

So, as you can see, there's multiple reasons why we'd want to keep both
pipewire and pulseaudio installed simultaneously.

--
Erich Eickmeyer
Ubuntu Studio Project Leader
Ubuntu MOTU