Sometimes pipewire gets installed instead of pulseaudio

Describe your issue

What's the expected behaviour?

Until we explicitly set pipewire as default (#1183 (closed)), we want pulseaudio to get installed:

• in new installs
• when upgrading packages

What's the current behaviour?

When upgrading packages, sometimes pulseaudio gets removed and pipewire-pulse gets installed instead.

In recent report #1374 (closed) it seems that pipewire even got installed by default again instead of pulseaudio, in a v21.12 image (but before it was officially released). Build logs should show which was installed exactly, just creating this issue for future reference, won't look into it deeper right now.

A workaround is doing sudo apk add !pipewire-pulse as mentioned here:

https://postmarketos.org/edge/2021/04/15/pipewire-pulse/

Similar issue, where we thought it was fixed in the end: #1067 (closed)

How to reproduce your issue?

Install or upgrade on phosh, reboot, be surprised that volume buttons don't work anymore, and in general that audio doesn't work anymore (e.g. vlc won't play anything and just show errors).

What device are you using?

pine64-pinephone

On what postmarketOS version did you encounter the issue?

• edge (master branch)
• v21.12 (reported in #1374 (closed))
• v21.06 (supported until 2022-01-29)

On what environment did you encounter the issue?

Phone environments

• Phosh

How did you get postmarketOS image?

• from https://images.postmarketos.org
• I built it using pmbootstrap

Additional information

• It seems to me that either pipewire or pulse get installed, depending on which package was built the most recently. I've had this multiple times, that I upgrade, and then pipewire gets installed and pulse uninstalled. Upgrading again a bit later usually restored it.

• Possible fix: adding !pipewire-pulse to postmarketos-ui-phosh - but this should be properly investigated and understood before.