Recently in #gentoo, somebody had enabled USE=systemwide without thoroughly reading the USE description. And subsequently, the wording of the messages presented to them gave them an indication that they needed to set up their system after installing pulseaudio. This is exacerbated by the fact the wiki links to pulseaudio's website ( in both the USE descriptions and the elog message ) now simply redirect to the relatively useless "http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/" This is because their wiki structure has changed, and the target articles are now hiding at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/WhatIsWrongWithSystemWide/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/SystemWide/ As for the wording, the phrasing: > PulseAudio in Gentoo can use a system-wide pulseaudio daemon. Is too easy to see in a positive light as a recommendation or instruction. And the rest of the log itself is too neutral toned about the feature, not even hinting that that it is a bad idea until you read as far as "What is wrong". I guess you're not going to be able to make it impossible to have a problem with, because user in question was somehow trying to add pulse to the default runlevel using the docs here, somehow not seeing all the bold text "SHOULD_NOT_GO_SYSTEMWIDE" stuff ... http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Server But the links themselves can be fixed up, and the emerge output can be made slightly less encouraging. For instance, > Systemwide pulseaudio daemons are strongly discouraged, unless you are > running a headless server. For more instructions, see: > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/WhatIsWrongWithSystemWide/ > http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Headless_server That gives - A stronger discouragement - Less mechanism to explain *how* to shoot themselves in the foot without further reading the USE description is of course much better in this regard, but USE descriptions are flawed in that people frequently enable without reading their definition.
Good point. I've changed the message to: > You have enabled the 'system-wide' USE flag for pulseaudio. > This mode should only be used on headless servers, embedded systems, > or thin clients. It will usually require manual configuration, and is > incompatible with many expected pulseaudio features. > On normal desktop systems, system-wide mode is STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. > For more information, see > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/WhatIsWrongWithSystemWide/ > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/SystemWide/ > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Headless_server + 17 Mar 2015; Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org> + pulseaudio-5.0-r4.ebuild, pulseaudio-5.0-r7.ebuild, + pulseaudio-5.99.3-r1.ebuild, pulseaudio-6.0.ebuild: + Update urls for USE=system-wide and make the elog message clearer about the + negative implications of the flag (bug #543574, thanks to Kent Fredric).
