I'm not too sure that this is the right place to files this, but -- Why does gnome still depend on esound? Gnome should use gstreamer, and have gstreamer pick which output method to use. I'm not sure, but I think the control panel and the sound events might still be using esound. Is there any patch so that everything in gnome outputs using gstreamer, as installing esound is very annoying when you have a hardware-mixing compatible card. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
that isn't what gstreamer does. From faq: 2.6. Is GStreamer a sound server ? No, GStreamer is not a soundserver. GStreamer does however have plugins supporting most of the major soundservers available today, including ESD, aRTSd, and to some extent Jack. Support for MAS is also planned. esound is still the official sound server for gnome until something better is available. Also esd should only be installed if you have the esd useflag set. On a clean install, USE="-esd" emerge gnome will not bring in esd.(gst-plugins and libao being the packages that would bring it in as a dep)
Gstreamer is not a sound server, but I don't understand why Gnome needs a sound server. Why can't it just output to the sound card? The Alsa libraries will handle mixing if hardware mixing is unavailable and dmix is set up. This is better than installing a sound server. In addition, gnome, gnome-session, libgnome, libgnomeui, control-center, and a few other packages all have unconditional dependencies on esound. A default audio sink can be set on Gstreamer, so if you really want to run esound, you could. However, some people just want to use Alsa and dmix, or Alsa by itself.
I guess Joe replied correctly. from emerge -evp gnome |grep esd [ebuild N ] media-libs/gst-plugins-0.8.2 +alsa -debug -debug -debug -esd -oss 1,932 kB Set USE=-esd
USE=-esd does not help enough. "In addition, gnome, gnome-session, libgnome, libgnomeui, control-center, and a few other packages all have unconditional dependencies on esound." I haven't tested anything yet with gnome-session and control-center, but libgnome and libgnomeui don't need esound. These packages can be built without a problem without esound, so I think it these packages should depend on esound only if the esd flag is set.
