New comment by ahesford on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/38521#issuecomment-1403832919

Comment:
All options are undesirable, sure; but they are not all equally undesirable.

As it stands, your proposal ships a pipewire package that will not function without adding additional packages. GNOME and KDE may pull in wireplumber; other people (like me) have already manually installed wireplumber; still others may only have pipewire installed, and not having pipewire pull in a session manager means that those users upgrading (or pulling pipewire for the first time) will find that the default configuration is broken.

You can make the argument that new users should read the docs, and we should have documentation that tells people "to use pipewire, install `pipewire` and `wireplumber`". However, that doesn't change the fact that dropping pipewire-media-session will pull the rug out from all users already using pipewire that aren't also using wireplumber (directly or transitively). That's a crappy experience. No matter what we do, we might cause problems for people with custom configs, but that is somewhat unavoiable and less crappy because those people should be expected to know how their configuration deviates and diagnose when it breaks.

If you conceded that *something* should exist as a convenience to pull in both pipewire and wireplumber, making `pipewire` the meta-package is necessary to ensure a smooth upgrade path. Keeping `pipewire` as is and making a new `pipewire-base` or something along those lines means upgrading users will not see the new package structure.