Pulseaudio module migration gconf => gsettings

[Martin Steigerwald]

Ben Cooksley - 27.06.18, 13:09:
> > Ben, you are shooting the messenger and there is a misunderstanding
> > coming from a lack of knowledge on how Debian works.
> > 
> > The dropping of the pulseaudio gconf subpackage It's not a decision
> > of the Debian KDE Team. This is a decision of the Debian Pulseaudio
> > packagers, and according the other comments from the bug, other
> > distributions are doing exactly the same.
> 
> Having looked at the exchanges made by the Debian Pulseaudio
> maintainer, they appear to have completely ignored plasma-pa, so their
> position of refusing to support GConf (when GSettings support has
> only just been introduced by Pulseaudio upstream) is quite
> unconscionable. No notice has been given at all. They should be
> compelled to restore that support to allow for a reasonable window
> for us to port.
> 
> Given how new the support in Pulseaudio is, it is unreasonable to
> expect us to have support ready for it in such a short time frame.

As I wrote in the Plasma bug report

Bug 386665 - Drop dependency on pulseaudio-gconf 
https://bugs.kde.org/386665

but probably should have better written here:

> It seems everyone seems to have different expectations here:
> 
> - Pulseaudio project appears to expect that people port over to
> gsettings at the *first* release with gsettings module, maybe due to
> technical difficulties of providing both modules (and synchronisation
> between them).
> 
> - Debian Pulseaudio package maintainer just uploaded Pulseaudio to
> upstream, instead of providing it in experimental in order to allow
> packages to be ported, arguing that gconf module has been deprecated
> (without proper replacement) since a long time.
> 
> - KDE upstream expects to have something stable to port to before
> starting the work. 
>
> All totally valid expectations, each with their own reasons. Just they
> do not go well together. Clearly communication about how to
> coordinate this migration has been missing. […]

But this all is in the past now and there is a plan forward.

If anything to take away from this, it might be to take a look at how 
the different involved projects can work together better. We have the 
distro-packagers list as a channel for communication between KDE and 
distros. It probably would have made sense to use this earlier for 
communicating about this issue. I decided to do that next time.

But as as far as I am aware there is nothing in place for communication 
of upstreams for Plasma / KDE Applications / KF5 with the KDE community. 
At the moment I don´t really have a clear idea on how to improve this. 
Maybe some upstream mailing list for important incompatibility 
announcements would be good, but it would put an additional burden on 
upstreams. Ideally upstreams would have a standard release note format 
for breaking changes that could be used. In the end even with a 
communication channel, it is up to the individual persons to use it.

OTOH this something like this does not happen all that often…

Thanks,
-- 
Martin