Bug#622989: pulseaudio: autospawn is evil

[Felipe Sateler]

Control: tags -1 wontfix

Hi Joss, waynr,

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 02:24:06PM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Package: pulseaudio
> Version: 0.9.22-1
> Severity: important
> 
> Now that we have dropped Esound, we run again into the same bugs we had 
> fixed with it.
> 
> Autospawn is bad. Very bad.
> Let’s say PulseAudio is installed on the system, but the user explicitly 
> disabled it, preventing its startup with the session. Now he starts an 
> application that can use PA, and it will just be autospawned, instead of 
> seeing the application fall back to ALSA.
> 
> This behavior is completely broken.
> 
> The fix is simple: change the default client.conf to set autospawn=no.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem very viable. If the pulseaudio daemon
stops for any reason (a bug?), then the daemon will not be restarted,
leaving the user with a possibly broken audio system.

Unless we have a way to ensure that the daemon will be restarted if it
crashes, then I don't see how disabling autospawn actually improves
things.

-- 
Saludos,
Felipe Sateler