How to prevent pipewire from interfering using packaging ?

Lone_Wolf · 2022-10-02 11:07:56

When doing pacman -Syu this morning I noticed several unknown (to me) packages were downloaded & added.
I investigated and found they were needed by pipewire .
Further investigation showed that fluidsynth (which I need for midi playback) had gained a hard dependency on pipewire.
See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/75968 and https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-p … 54f733e75a

For clarity :
All my personal systems and those I help maintain run pure alsa with just enough installed of pulseaudio (so libpulse/lib32-libpulse) to let apps know there's no pulseaudio support available .

Pipewire has been installed for testing a few times (last one was 1 week ago while testing some wayland compositors) .
It gave me several issues which were gone completely after I removed it.

I have no need for functionality provided by pipewire.

Some options I have to prevent pipewire to interfere with my system :

create an empty pipewire-dummy package to satisfy pipewire dep . Imo this is a dirty solution with many drawbacks.

build my own version of fluidsynth locally without pipewire support
doable, but requires me to keep track of fluidsynth development.
This also would need to be done for every application I use that gains a hard dependency on pipewire .

investigate how to install a bare minimum of pipewire to achieve 2 goals:
- ensure pipewire doesn't take over audio/video .
- convince applications there is no pipewire support available
Assuming those 2 are attainable a 3rd goal surfaces : convince archlinux devs to implement this solution .

Do you see other options or have comments ?

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2022-10-02 11:10:07)

Arch Linux

#1 2022-10-02 11:07:56

How to prevent pipewire from interfering using packaging ?

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