[pulseaudio-discuss] systemd socket activation support

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

So while at linux plumbers attending the systemd hackfest, I thought a good
use of the hacking time I had available would be to allow PulseAudio to be
activated via systemd's socket activation system.

The changes needed are actually quite minimal, and by doing this we can
disable quite a lot of code in PulseAudio related to autospawning (which
does still seem to cause some problems for some users) and we also get a few
handy side effects too.

It becomes much easier, as a developer, to stop the system PulseAudio and run
your own test instance i.e. you do not have to disable autospawning before
killing the system PA - you just run:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket pulseaudio.service

and then run your test version.

A second advantage is that there is a relatively simple and documented way to
run e.g. mpd as a normal user before you login via the systemd user lingering
feature.

I've written a few docs about all this here:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Running/

(NB I've assumed v6 for landing this but that could be updated as needed)

All the best!

Col