Starting with pipewire-0.3.22, it is now possible to disable dbus : https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/releases/0.3.22 [...] Make an option to disable dbus support. [...]
Having spent most of the past week working with PipeWire build system (and the ebuild), let me assure you that there is no way to disable D-Bus in the build system neither for the latest version 0.3.24 nor the master branch right now. Nor was there one for the 0.3.23 that I worked on previously. I can't speak for 0.3.22, this bug report references, as I haven't looked at its internals, but my vague understanding was that PipeWire around that time gained the ability to deal with situations where the D-Bus user session is not running. This does not mean it works well (if at all) but if there's no build system switch to flip, there's no reasonable way to make it happen. Even if D-Bus is perhaps no longer a strict runtime requirements, at build time D-Bus headers and libraries are required to satisfy the dbus_dep = dependency('dbus-1') line found at: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/blob/master/meson.build#L309 Finally I'd like to point out that without D-Bus not only might Bluetooth stop working well/at all but it will completely cut communication with rtkit which is rather important to have if one desires low latency audio.
Indeed. The only thing I see between 0.3.21 and 0.3.22 is commit 70390a631efe55b03013d9fb71f63ce1a0904cdd Author: Wim Taymans <wtaymans@redhat.com> Date: Fri Feb 12 17:57:24 2021 +0100 context: add suport.dbus option Add a support.dbus option in the context that can be used to disable the dbus feature. which is not a build-time option.