Is setting +pulseaudio by default for gstreamer1-gst-plugins-good really necessary?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 24, 2019, at 11:19, Gijs Vermeulen wrote:

> The dependency on gstreamer plugins has recently grown in Wine.

I haven't updated the wine ports in months, so I don't think anything has happened there recently...


> When installing -good I noticed it has pulseaudio as a default variant.
> Looking at the portfile I couldn't find a reason why. Building with -pulseaudio works fine for me.
> 
> Could anyone shed some light on this decision? Using/requiring pulseaudio seems counterproductive to me.

It looks like the variant was added 5 years ago:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/commit/be8824094e6c33c603c905ce127960eb878475f6

Prior to that point, pulseaudio support was unconditionally enabled. There was no way for a user to disable it. Adding the variant provided a way for users to disable it. Leaving it enabled by default ensured that users who had relied on pulseaudio support were not suddenly without it. In MacPorts, we often err on the side of enabling more features, since that simplifies dependency management and usually results in happier users.

Why do you believe defaulting to enabling pulseaudio support is bad? Why is simply installing the port without the pulseaudio variant, if you don't want those features, not acceptable?

I am not especially familiar with this software, so the answer may be obvious to someone who is.