Bug#739329: pulseaudio related problems....

[Ben Hutchings]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Ben Hutchings <ben at decadent.org.uk>
To: debian-devel at lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: pulseaudio related problems....
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 18:40:23 +0000
Message-id: <1392662423.6624.29.camel at deadeye.wl.decadent.org.uk>

On Mon, 2014-02-17 at 18:15 +0100, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote:
> Le 2014-02-17 16:00, Thomas Goirand a écrit :
> > On 02/17/2014 04:02 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> >> Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your 
> >> home
> >> directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.
> >
> > Oh !!!
> >
> > Now I do remember why my pulseaudio system works. It's because I
> > followed to the letter this howto:
> > 
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/
> >
> > Well, having a look at it, it seems it changed quite a bit. But 
> > that's
> > what I followed.
> >
> > The question is: why don't we have this by default in Debian? Why 
> > would
> > it be up to the user to configure each and every software to use the
> > correct audio stack? IMO, it'd be great if we had consistency.
> 
> Probably because, "Debian is about choice", which makes such 
> wide-ranging changing
> impossible. Because pulseaudio is not assumed, because udev is not 
> assumed, one can

At this point, udev can be assumed (outside of chroots and containers
that have no devices of their own).  You cannot install an offical
kernel package without it.  popcon shows an installation rate of 99.62%.

> not put a configuration in /etc/asound.conf that says to use pulse. 
[...]

Well, not in the basic ALSA packages.  But it should be possible for the
pulseaudio package to install a configuration file that does this.

In fact, there is this:

$ cat /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/99-pulseaudio-default.conf.example 
# Default to PulseAudio

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
    hint {
        show on
        description "Default ALSA Output (currently PulseAudio Sound Server)"
    }
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}
$

But it has no effect because its filename extension is '.example' not
'.conf'.   It's installed by libasound2-plugins, which contains the
pulseaudio plugins and others.

So maybe the necessary change would be:
- move the pulseaudio ALSA plugins and this config file into a new
  binary package
- rename the config file so it's not just an example
- make pulseaudio recommend that binary package

Or alternately:
- move just this config file into a new binary package, depending on
  libasound2-plugins
- make pulseaudio recommend that binary package

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
You can't have everything.  Where would you put it?

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