[pulseaudio-discuss] installing header files

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 10.08.09 17:58, Patrick Shirkey (pshirkey at boosthardware.com) wrote:

>> Yeah I guess a default install will probably not install 32 bit libs.  
>> I doubt that is any different in other distros either. We did have  
>> specific deps added for our flash package (typically run as a 32 bit  
>> processes - it's only recently gone native as you know).
>
> Yes. But it is much more stable then the 32 bit version on my system  
> even though it is in beta phase.
>
> Can I humbly suggest to the various distro packagers that monitor this  
> list to ensure that the 32 bit libs are installed by default for a  
> desktop system?

Hmm? Why?

I am pretty thankful that my Fedora 64 installations installs no 32bit
cruft by default.

Nowadays there are only 2 reasons why one would want to keep a 32bit
env around: Skype and WINE. The former is closed source and broken
anyway. The latter we don't install by default, but if you install it
will pull in the necessary deps.

So I really see no reason why we should ship a 32bit env in fedora by
default... 

>> This is true, but it's more about knowing how 64 and 32 bit systems  
>> work together. Even before pulse there needed to be a 32 bit version  
>> of libasound for things to work. Now we need a 32 bit libpulse (and a  
>> 32 bit alsa->pulse plugin) so things aren't so very different than  
>> they used to be in all honesty. I don't think anything major went  
>> wrong in your case, just some bizarre hiccups that were compounded to  
>> become rather confusing overall. I suspect most users would not have  
>> been so unlucky (otherwise we'd see far more questions on this list :))
>
> Possibly or maybe many people just don't understand what is going on and  
> instead just remove pulse audio from their systems. I have seen  
> innumerable recommendations on every major distro forum, skype forums,  
> realplayer forums and various blogs and mailing lists  to do so while i  
> have been testing the system over the past couple of months.

That Skype is a mess is not really anything free software folks can do
anything about. It's closed source. The Linux version is barely
maintained and does about everything wrong that it can do wrong. I
know that some folks believe that Skype's incompat with PA is my
problem. But quite frankly, it is not. It's Skype's problem.

Also, Realplayer? Why would anyone want to use that? 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4