[pulseaudio-discuss] libcanberra should be an optional dependency for pavucontrol

[Colin Guthrie]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 06.10.08 13:09, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:
> 
>> I agree (ish). While libcanberra is the defacto implementation of the 
>> sound theme spec, it is just an implementation and if an alternative 
>> library is written (e.g. for use in Qt - and yes I know it would make 
>> more sense to use libcanberra for Qt, but this is just "in theory" ;)) 
>> that also implements the spec, then pavucontrol would not compile
>> there.
> 
> Uh? In which way would it matter whether KDE/Qt had an alternative library
> for event sounds? pavucontrol is a Gtk application -- and it's going
> to stay that way. And for gtk apps using kde apis is not going to
> happen.
> 
> If you really want no event sounds then compile the null driver into
> your libcanberra build or set $CANBERRA_DRIVER to null.

That's why I only said "ish" and why the rest of my mail went on to say 
what it did! It certainly wasn't suggesting using Qt/KDE APIs or 
anything (dunno where you read that into it!) just saying that if there 
was an alternative library implmenting the spec, then to have to compile 
and ship *two* of these libraries seems annoying, and perhaps 
pavucontrol should just cope by itself. But then I went on to say if 
it's just using libcanberra as a handy implementation of the for it's 
own use then this seems totally sensible and that the alternative is to 
copy half the code into pavucontrol directly which doesn't make one iota 
of sense!

>> I guess the bigger question of "do you want the sound theme part of the 
>> pavucontrol UI compiled when the desktop does not support it" is really 
>> what needs answered.
> 
> No. Doing stuff like this during build time is crack. Do it during
> runtime if you must.

Yay and nay. I don't disagree but in a system dedicated to non-gtk apps, 
with only a couple thrown in for essential stuff like PA, it would be 
pretty nice to be able to disable it at compile time as it's one less 
dependency to package, build and distribute. I can certainly see why 
this may be desirable. But that said libcanberra is pretty small and has 
many times less deps than pavucontrol itself so building and shipping it 
shouldn't be a major problem for folk. Just a sadly unnecessary step for 
folks that wont (yet) be using it.

A lot of these problems would go away if Qt were to adopt this spec ;)

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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