Comment 5 for bug 177072

Patching esd_get_socket_dirname in utils.c without #ifdef would also affect the behaviour of the original esound-daemon (if somebody is not using pulse as replacement) as it uses the name from this function for the creation of the socket, too. I'm not sure if this might lead to problems.

The idea behind the extra package was that if they install pulseaudio-esound-compat it could conflict with the -alsa one and require the -pulse one. And if pulse gets included by default in ubuntu-desktop (which currently is the case) -alsa should automatically get removed because of this. The old esound package on the other hand should conflict with the -pulse version of the lib, so the people can install it aswell. However this might be wrong, since I don't know that much about packaging.

I'm also not sure about this being a wishlist bug, since it could be the fix to a bugreport rated medium (#177486), which keeps the default irc-client frozen for about a minute directly after you start it.