Building xrdp PulseAudio modules for great remote desktop experience

[Dominik George]

[ Please keep me addresses directly as I am not subscribed to the list ☺! ]

Hi PulseAudio Debian team,

today, a new version of xrdp, a highly advanced RDP server for Linux, has 
entered Debian unstable. With this version, we now enable users to build fast, 
reliable and compatible terminal server setups based on only free software. 
The main differences between xrdp and other solutions are these two:

 * xrdp has X.org drivers that handle video and input and everything
   is accessed natively, gaining very high performance, and
 * RDP is very widely adopted and anyone can use an RDP terminal server
   without installing any new software, no matter what OS they are using.

In order to provide audio support, xrdp ships a sink and a source that PA can 
load to send and receive sound over a side-channel of the RDP connection.

Unfortunately, in order to build these modules, a complete PulseAudio source 
tree is needed, and that's why we cannot build it for the xrdp package right 
now.

I am not experienced with PulseAudio development, so maybe you can provide 
some useful information, like:

 * Is a full source tree really needed, or is the xrdp upstream doing
   unnecessary things we could change?
 * How are other third-party modules in Debian built, if any?
 * Any ideas on how to get this stuff built for xrdp?

Right now, I see two ways of solving this:

 * Provide a pulseaudio-src package with the full source tree - however,
   I do not see how anyone else could benefit from that, so it would
   unnecessarily bloat the archive, or
 * Build the modules with the pulseaudio source package instead, but I assume
   that you as a team are not keen in building a ton of third-party modules 
   for others.

You can find the xrdp source package in the usual places.

Hoping for any helpful ideas,
Nik

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