[pulseaudio-tickets] [Bug 105907] pulse-cli-syntax man page should describe suspend and kill in more detail

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105907

--- Comment #1 from Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> ---
(In reply to Frederick Eaton from comment #0)
> I've been reading pulse-cli-syntax(5) and I don't understand what is the
> difference between 'suspend-sink' and 'kill-sink-input' and how they are
> used. Is it true that I use the former when I want to free a hardware device
> so I can open it from another sound server, and that I would use the latter
> command to stop a client from playing sound without killing its process?
> Will Pulseaudio just ignore any further samples that are sent by a client or
> sink input which has been "killed", or will the client get an error of some
> kind?

You're correct about what suspending does. Killing a sink input will terminate
that particular application stream. The application will get notified about the
stream termination. The application isn't disconnected from pulseaudio, and it
can create a new stream if it wants to (but more likely it will just be
confused, because it's unusual for streams to die all of a sudden).

> Is there another manual page or document which describes these in more
> detail?
> 
> What is the meaning of the argument to 'suspend-sink' and 'suspend' which is
> boolean?
> 
> What is the difference between removing a client or sink, and removing it
> "forcibly" (as the manual page says is done by the "kill-" commands)?

Normally clients themselves control when they disconnect themselves or
terminate their streams. "Forcibly" refers to the client not being in control.

> I think all of this should be documented in a place which is easy for new
> users to locate, such as the pulse-cli-syntax(5) man page or some document
> which is referenced by it. As it is, I find a lot of examples on the web
> invoking things like 'pacmd suspend true' and each time I read this stuff I
> go to your man page and find it frustratingly incomplete.

You're right, at least the suspend commands have quite limited documentation in
pulse-cli-syntax(5). I submitted a patch:
https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/215758/

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