Orphaned Packages in rawhide (2015-02-10)

[Petr Pisar]

On 2015-02-16, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Petr Pisar wrote:
>> 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.

I don't buy this argument. Software should enable people to do
things. Not to disable.

> * 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?

I cannot speak much about aRrts. But the the ESound works over network.
And it is indended to work so in contrast to PulseAudio whose network
features are officially unsupported (e.g. the server terminates when
last client disconnects without possibility to set otherwise so it's
useless as a server).

Also please note that supporting aRts (or any other SDL sound output) does
not mean other people have to install aRts if the want to enjoy the SDL.
It's just a build-time requirement.

> * 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.

If one of the sound libraries will be removed from Fedora, I will drop
the dependency from SDL. It's so simple. On the other hand I cannot see
a reason why to disable the support.

-- Petr