[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1029763: pipewire: does not seem to work unless xdg-desktop-portal is running

[Dylan Aïssi]

Hello,

Le sam. 28 janv. 2023 à 12:00, Wouter Verhelst <wouter at debian.org> a écrit :
>
>
> I did not install pipewire manually; it was installed through dependencies.
>

It would be great to understand how pipewire pkgs have been pulled on your
system since I don't know which packages are installed by awesome. But that
could be non trivial as the dependency responsible for this may no longer
exist.

> In the mean time I removed pipewire as a workaround, but looking through
> dpkg.log told me how to reproduce it. If I have these installed, there
> is no audio:
>
> wouter at pc220518:~$ dpkg -l |grep pipewire
> ii  libpipewire-0.3-0:amd64                       0.3.65-1                                     amd64        libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server
> ii  libpipewire-0.3-modules:amd64                 0.3.65-1                                     amd64        libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server - modules
> ii  pipewire:amd64                                0.3.65-1                                     amd64        audio and video processing engine multimedia server
> ii  pipewire-bin                                  0.3.65-1                                     amd64        PipeWire multimedia server - programs
> ii  pipewire-media-session                        0.4.2-1                                      amd64        example session manager for PipeWire
> ii  pipewire-pulse                                0.3.65-1                                     amd64        PipeWire PulseAudio daemon
>
>
> I'm guessing the problem is that "pipewire-pulse" is installed (which
> redirects pulseaudio stuff to pipewire), but "pipewire-audio" isn't
> (meaning there's nowhere for the audio to go)
>
> This guess is supported by the fact that if I run "pavucontrol" and go
> to the "Configuration" tab, it says there are no devices available.
>

So, the real issue is when both pipewire-media-session and pipewire-pulse are
pulled by dependencies. This breaks sound and users have to create an empty file
to make the sound working. This empty file has been deleted because of some
conflicts with pulseaudio in the past https://bugs.debian.org/1006364.
But, I will create a new package for them and make pipewire-pulse
recommend wireplumber or this new package.

> I don't "want" to use pipewire, it was (partially) installed on my
> system and broke all audio ;-)

If you don't want to use pipewire, you can remove pipewire-pulse and
wireplumber/pipewire-media-session. If you want to use pipewire only for
screen-sharing (but I doubt based on your previous message), you can keep
pipewire-media-session but be sure to not have the file:
  /usr/share/pipewire/media-session.d/with-pulseaudio

Best regards,
Dylan