Comment 39 for bug 198453

Having Ubuntu 8.04 LTS actually work (apps play sounds at the same time) seems to be more important than maintaining perfect cross-variant package elegance on this one package.

Why not introduce an "alsa-pulse" package that (provides: alsa-lib; conflicts: alsa-lib; depends: pulseaudio) that consists of alsa-lib with pulse audio as the default device? Include that in the pulseaudio variants and the existing lib in the non-pulse variants.