PipeWire as required dependency for xdp-kde

[Jan Grulich]

On středa 8. dubna 2020 9:37:35 CEST Eric Hameleers wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Apr 2020, Jan Grulich wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I would like to make PipeWire as a required dependency for
> > xdg-desktop-portal- kde. The reason is that it's heavily used in Wayland
> > integration part, which is now being used on other places and I don't
> > want to add ifdefs all over the place. This would be a new requirement
> > for Plasma 5.19. I want to ask if this is okay for distributions. At
> > least I know that Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE have PipeWire
> > available in their repositories. What about others?
> > 
> > I would like to also point out that this brings screen sharing support on
> > Wayland so it's quite important part of xdg-desktop-portal-kde.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Jan
> 
> I do not like the idea of imposing this as a hard dependency.
> Slackware does not ship pipewire, we are also not interested in
> Wayland.
> I looked at it and noticed that pipewire has no formal releases and
> distros ship it with a 0.2 or 0.3 version number. Should Plasma really
> hard-depend on a piece of software which is immature or at least not
> properly managed? Also, pipewire comes with its own dependency chain
> which we do not fully cover in Slackware.
> Could you please reconsider this idea.

There are formal releases, I see them on GitHub [1], no idea why not on Gitlab 
since PipeWire moved there. With PipeWire 0.3.x, things has changed quite 
significantly as they promised no API/ABI breakages in stable releases, which 
happened from time to time in PipeWire 0.2.x, but that was because it started 
being used and with that some API redesigns were needed. And like it or not, 
but PipeWire will be more and more important, it's needed for Wayland screen 
sharing, will be used in Flatpak for access to web cams and I was told it will 
be used in KWin for other things and plan is to replace PulseAudio with it one 
day.

[1] - https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire/releases

Jan