Bug#1029648: gnome-core 1:43+1 not installable with Pulseaudio

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2023 at 15:10:52 -0500, Rann Bar-On wrote:
> gnome-core 43+1 depends on pipewire-audio, which conflicts with
> pulseaudio, making gnome-core uninstallable with pulseaudio.

It is intentional that the default audio setup for GNOME is Pipewire, and
it is intentional that users upgrading from Debian 11 to 12 should usually
get PulseAudio replaced by Pipewire during that upgrade (see #1020249).

It continues to be possible to run GNOME without installing gnome-core,
by installing gnome-session (which is the minimal GNOME session) and
whatever applications you want to run: for example, you could install
all of the dependencies of gnome-core except for pipewire-audio if that's
what you want, and that would be a valid way to configure a system.

I don't know whether it's intentional that it is no longer possible to
install gnome-core and pulseaudio together.

Pipewire maintainers: do you have an opinion on whether gnome-core should
return to depending on the individual dependencies of pipewire-audio,
rather than on the metapackage?

I'm not sure that I understand why pipewire-alsa and pipewire-audio need
to conflict with pulseaudio. Would it be sufficient to rename
/etc/alsa/conf.d/99-pipewire-default.conf to sort later than 99-pulse.conf,
or ask the pulseaudio maintainers to rename /etc/alsa/conf.d/99-pulse.conf
to sort slightly earlier? That would restore the older behaviour in which
installing both pulseaudio and the equivalent of pipewire-audio is possible,
and Pipewire "wins"?

> I think this is a probem!

Please clarify why this is a problem?

If there are reasons why you need to continue to use pulseaudio instead
of pipewire-pulse's implementation of a PulseAudio-compatible audio server,
please report them as bugs or feature requests in pipewire-pulse.

Did you previously have pipewire-pulse installed? If yes, how did you
arrange to avoid it taking precedence over pulseaudio?

(If the answer is that you were previously using pipewire-pulse as your
audio service, you were no longer running pulseaudio, and you hadn't
noticed any difference, then that is pipewire-pulse working as intended!)

I can see that requiring apt to figure out that it can remove pulseaudio
during upgrades might be problematic, since apt is often reluctant to
remove packages, and for that reason it might be better if we could find
a solution where leaving pulseaudio installed and inactive is possible.

Thanks,
    smcv