Bug#888283: pulseaudio: pulseaudio unnecessarily re-execs itself on startup

[Vivek Das Mohapatra]

Package: pulseaudio
Version: 10.0-1+deb9u1
Severity: minor

Hi:

While debugging an unrelated matter, I noticed that pulseaudio was
re-execing itself very soon after startup. Upon investigating further
I discovered this:

src/daemon/main.c:398
============================================================================
#if defined(__linux__) && defined(__OPTIMIZE__)
    /*
       Disable lazy relocations to make usage of external libraries
       more deterministic for our RT threads. We abuse __OPTIMIZE__ as
       a check whether we are a debug build or not. This all is
       admittedly a bit snake-oilish.
    */

    if (!getenv("LD_BIND_NOW")) {
    ⋮
    pa_set_env("LD_BIND_NOW", "1");

    if ((canonical_rp = pa_realpath(PA_BINARY))) {

        if ((rp = pa_readlink("/proc/self/exe"))) {

            if (pa_streq(rp, canonical_rp))
                pa_assert_se(execv(rp, argv) == 0)
============================================================================

However pulseaudio is linked with ‘-z now’:

vivek at noise:~$ readelf -a $(which pulseaudio) | grep NOW 
 0x000000000000001e (FLAGS)              BIND_NOW
 0x000000006ffffffb (FLAGS_1)            Flags: NOW PIE

So relocations will happen early anyway, making the re-exec (I believe)
unnecessary.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.3
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386