Bug#1049417: pavucontrol: Please loosen Recommends, and allow pipewire-pulse as an alternative to pulseaudio

[Arnaud Rebillout]

Source: pavucontrol
Version: 5.0-2
Severity: normal
User: devel at kali.org
Usertags: origin-kali

Dear Maintainer,

it would be nice if pavucontrol would Recommend
'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' instead of simply 'pulseaudio'.

For background: in Kali Linux (a derivative based on Debian testing), we
switched from pulseaudio to pipewire in our flagship desktop XFCE, that
was back in May 2023 [1]. So far so good: sound works great, and
pavucontrol also works, via the compat daemon pipewire-pulse. I'm not
claiming *everything* works 100% (I just don't know), but it seems that 
it works well enough, based on the feedback we had so far on our bug
tracker.

XUbuntu (XFCE's flavor of Ubuntu) also switched to pipewire in version 
23.04, back in Apr 2023 [2].

A minor issue, in Kali, is that we still have to install pulseaudio, due
to the fact that xfce4 depends on pavucontrol, itself depending on
pulseaudio. So pulseaudio must be installed, even though it's not 
running.

On the same line, we also can't install the metapackage pipewire-audio, 
since it Conflicts with pulseaudio, hence breaks the xfce4 metapackage.

Changing the Recommends field of pavucontrol to
'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' would solve those two issues, and more
generally it would make life easier for people who want to switch to
pipewire and remove pulseaudio, while still using pavucontrol.

I've seen that a MR is already open [3].

Thanks for considering this change,

Arnaud

----

[1] https://www.kali.org/blog/kali-linux-2023-2-release/#xfce--pipewire
[2] https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-23-04-released/
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/pulseaudio-team/pavucontrol/-/merge_requests/5