[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#925455: alsa volume never saved/restored

[Laurent Bigonville]

Package: alsa-utils
Version: 1.1.8-1
Severity: important
File: /lib/systemd/system/alsa-restore.service

Hi,

On my newly installed laptop, the volume is never saved and restored

It seems that the "alsa-restore.service" is never "started/stopped"
because there is a condition not met:

$ systemctl status alsa-restore.service 
● alsa-restore.service - Save/Restore Sound Card State
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/alsa-restore.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Mon 2019-03-25 10:25:34 CET; 1h 15min ago
     Docs: man:alsactl(1)

mar 25 10:25:34 edoras systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Save/Restore Sound Card State being skipped.

Looking a bit further it seems that /var/lib/alsa/asound.state doesn't
exist.

That means that we are facing a chicken-egg problem here, the file will
never be created as the service is never started (and then never
stopped).

An option might be to create an empty file in the postinst script on the
first installation. An empty file will cause the "alsa restore" command
to fail with return code 99 but the systemd service will still be marked
as "active (exited)" and the ExecStop will be executed on shutdown
meaning that the volume will be saved. (Wouldn't that cause issue with
some setup?)

AFAICS, it's a regression and we might want to get this fixed in buster,
if you think it should be the case, please make this bug RC.

Kind regards,
Laurent Bigonville

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_BE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=fr_BE:fr (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages alsa-utils depends on:
ii  kmod              26-1
ii  libasound2        1.1.8-1
ii  libc6             2.28-8
ii  libfftw3-single3  3.3.8-2
ii  libncursesw6      6.1+20181013-2
ii  libsamplerate0    0.1.9-2
ii  libtinfo6         6.1+20181013-2
ii  lsb-base          10.2019031300
ii  whiptail          0.52.20-8

alsa-utils recommends no packages.

alsa-utils suggests no packages.

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