Orphaned Packages in rawhide (2015-02-10)

[Kevin Kofler]

Petr Pisar wrote:

> On 2015-02-12, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>>
>> Feel free, however, to build SDL without aRts and esound support. The
>> only reason aRts is still in Fedora at all is for things that support
>> ONLY aRts for sound output (in particular, the knotify in kdelibs3 and
>> the kdelibs3 game taxipilot). There is nothing using aRts as its native
>> sound server anymore, and there hasn't been since Fedora 9 (!). What will
>> happen if you try to use aRts output is that an instance of aRts will be
>> spawned, talking to ALSA, and terminated once the aRts-using application
>> exits. In the default setup, that means you're running aRts on top of
>> PulseAudio through the ALSA PulseAudio plugin, not a very interesting
>> setup. (Better use PulseAudio directly.) And using aRts INSTEAD of
>> PulseAudio is clearly not something we can or should support anymore, as
>> most applications no longer support aRts, if they ever did. Esound
>> support is similarly obsolete, it is only emulated by PulseAudio (we
>> haven't been shipping the real ESD for a long time, I think since Fedora
>> 8 (!)), so it is better to use native PulseAudio output.
>>
> You are missing the point that Fedora clients can be run against
> non-Fedora servers.

A remote aRts sound server? Sure, it's possible in theory 
(http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=101656194718836&w=2), but in practice:
* It was never a common setup. See the manual configuration steps required.
  We also no longer ship the KDE 3 KControl, so setting that option would be
  another manual step now.
* Who is still running a remote aRts server? Remember we're talking about a
  KDE 3 technology. RHEL 5 is pretty much the only still supported KDE 3
  distro in the world. It is possible in theory to start up an aRts server
  manually on Fedora and RHEL (most other distros dropped aRts entirely by
  now), but why would you use that over PulseAudio? The only reason we ship
  aRts at all is for programs supporting nothing else (i.e., kdelibs3 and
  some programs using it), so that aRts can forward their sound to
  PulseAudio or directly to the hardware.
* Why would you want to use the legacy aRts for this purpose rather than
  PulseAudio?
* SDL is one of the last libraries to support aRts at all. Supporting it
  only in SDL does not help users when all their other applications no
  longer support it.
So I really don't see the point in keeping aRts support in SDL.

I'm a bit less familiar with ESD, but as far as I know, the situation is 
very similar there.

        Kevin Kofler