Bug 2366473

Summary: add replacements for pulseaudio and pa-info to pipewire-pulseaudio to prevent new users from breaking their audio setup
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: anotheruser <7grrar1r+redhat>
Component: pipewireAssignee: Wim Taymans <wtaymans>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 42CC: suraj.ghimire7, wtaymans
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OS: Linux   
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Description anotheruser 2025-05-15 10:55:21 UTC
New inexperienced user broke their audio on a new F42 workstation setup.
 It turned out that both pulseaudio and pipewire were installed.
every app using pulseaudio (GNOME Desktop , firefox ) is affexted by this. 
Pulseaudio is now blocked

We found this dnf4 transaction, most likely initiated by PackageKit-command-not-found

```
Transaction ID : 4
Begin time     : ven. 09 mai 2025 11:53:20
Begin rpmdb    : cbe1544f72af5b8976844e0655eafeb456aaa38f71a44463bc0f10600697ba03
End time       : ven. 09 mai 2025 11:53:23 (3 seconds)
End rpmdb      : 42dd6f003ed84d6b24a8e80607afd3f9104ad01b3b26eb259f629029b0065498
User           : Louise <louise>
Return-Code    : Success
Releasever     :
Command Line   :
Comment        :
Packages Altered:
    Install pulseaudio-17.0-5.fc42.x86_64                  @fedora
    Install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth-17.0-5.fc42.x86_64 @fedora
    Install speexdsp-1.2.1-8.fc42.x86_64                   @fedora
    Removed pipewire-pulseaudio-1.4.2-1.fc42.x86_64        @@System
```

The most likely canditate to trigger this could be 'pulseaudio --version' or 'pulseaudio --check'  following some instructions found on the web.

I could reproduce this with the command pa-info 



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.try to run  'pulseaudio' or  'pa-info'
2.confirm with y  twice  to let packagekit do its thing
3.

Actual Results:
audio system is broken 

Expected Results:
by packaging some dummy script replacement for

$ rpm -ql pulseaudio |grep bin/
/usr/bin/pa-info
/usr/bin/pulseaudio

would prevent packagekit to offer the installation of pulseaudio server


 

Additional Information:
I think it's actually a PackageKit-command-not-found issue, allowing users to perform a transaction which dnf5 would not perform unless the option  --allowerasing was used

But I think this workaround would help new, inexperienced users from shooting themselves in the foot.