The depends on libpulse is *intentional* as PulseAudio is the default host audio driver we build for QEMU.
* Fri Sep 4 2009 Mark McLoughlin <markmc> - 2:0.10.91-0.9.rc1
- Make pulseaudio the default audio backend (#519540, #495964, #496627)
I've taken some time to think about this.
In this context, does default mean "mandatory"? As far as I can tell by rpm -qil pulseaudio-libs, there isn't even a static pulse library.
Since libpulse is a shared object, you can know whether it's installed by what dlopen() returns.