Not everybody uses pulseaudio, and I always have to force-remove libpulse after updates (librewolf works without it). It is annoying enough that I had to reinstall wayland (which will block librewolf startup if it is missing).
I tried "--assume-installed libpulse=15.0", but that doesn't work; it satisfies librewolf but not pacman, it doesn't create a dummy libpulse entry in /var/lib/pacman/local.
#PKGBUILD
pkgname=libpulse-dummy
pkgver=1.0
pkgrel=1
arch=(x86_64)
provides=(libpulse)
conflicts=(libpulse)
package() {
pkgdesc="(dummy library)"
depends=()
license=(LGPL)
}
That works, but seems a little silly. Unfortunately it won't work with wayland (a wayland bug - it blocks startup even if not running).
If you really want to not have libpulse installed, you can
IgnorePkg:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Skip_package_from_being_upgraded
Keep in mind the warning, which applies to Artix as well to Arch:
Not sure that IgnorePkg will work, it should prevent updates. What's wrong with making libpulse an optional dependency?
As described in the documentation, it makes that package to be skipped when upgrading the system. Effectively, it is as if it was force-removed after each upgrade, except that it isn't ever installed in the first place. Naturally, this could in general theory make software break, so it isn't officially supported. It constitutes a "partial upgrade (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported)".
I don't maintain librewolf in Artix, so I don't know the exact details about it, but I have notified the other Artix team members about this thread.
librewolf is a fork of firefox, which is where the depend is from.
artist
libpulse is also required by some desktops, ungoogled chromium and ffmpeg among other things. But you can have libpulse installed without installing pulseaudio, and still have an alsa based system, if it is helpful to note, although perhaps you have strict requirements for having no pulse audio related packages, of course.
ldd shows neither the librewolf binary nor any of the .so files shipped with librewolf are linked to libpulse. Since OP reports that librewolf works without libpulse, the dependency can probably be made optional.
I checked all my packages that "require" libpulse, and librewolf really seems to be an exception here. Things like (ungoogled)-chromium, ffmpeg, mpv, and various libraries are linked to libpulse directly, so they'll fail to load at all if it is missing. (Actually, can someone confirm that librewolf does work with pulseaudio..?)
Of course, if upstream declares it is needed, I understand that Artix developers rather believe that than spend time checking for themselves and/or risking breakage. The concept of an "optional dependency" isn't as universal as a mere "dependency".