PulseAudio ebuild was updated to 12.2. As part of the upgrade, the gnome was removed and gconf was introduced. The gconf flag is pulling gnome-base/gconf package as a dependency, but does not pass the --enable-gconf option to configure script to actually use it. I think we should either fix gconf flag to pass the option and build "gconf module" for PulseAudio or drop it completely.
Maybe this is what causes pulseaudio not to read your settings... I'm having a lot of problems with the pulseaudio.
This is on purpose. USE=gconf is for migrating settings from gconf to gsettings, not for the gconf module. gconf module is deprecated and we do not build it, and we will not be adding it back.
Note that USE=gconf has a full local USE flag description towards that effect as well. In other words - we already dropped it completely with PA-12; USE=gconf provides settings migration for stuff that was configured via the gconf module before (this was not commonly used with GNOME and others; mostly a paprefs things)
Hi Mart, Thank you very much for clarification. I wonder, with the "migration" you mentioned, is that gonna be done by PulseAudio automatically? If so, can you point me out to the source where that happens. Or is just so gconf package stays installed and you can manually pick values you need out there and move them onto the GSettings? In which case do we really need this flag? Sorry, I'm just trying to figure out what's happening. Regards, Garry
pulseaudio-12 ships a migration file for gconf: /usr/share/GConf/gsettings/pulseaudio.convert That describes what gconf settings get migrated to what GSettings. For this conversion to work, gsettings-data-convert needs to be installed. gconf package ships that, thus USE=gconf on pulseaudio just pulls in gconf to ensure it's there. This was a common theme and how things were handled years ago, when GNOME-3 happened, etc; pulseaudio is just very very late to that party and by know most of the other packages that handled it as such have the gconf migration long gone.
Basically it should be a one-shot migration and once it's done (for all users, etc), you don't need gconf installed anymore. Well, generally, maybe PA does something different. I have not looked in detail what settings in gconf pulseaudio had, how important these are and when exactly the migration might get called. I also don't know what happens if you launch PA-12, but don't have gconf installed at the time, but add it later (the years ago migration usually had a gsettings "migrated" key that got set to True once migration was done and then it never did it again; there also I don't know what happened if you didn't have gconf at the time, but back then it was very uncommon to not have it, as things were progressively migrating and many things still required it back then, thus the migration tool was present).
Hi Mart, Thanks a lot for your detailed write-up. That really helps a lot. Regards, Garry
