[pulseaudio-discuss] main.c: daemon startup failed.

[Sean McNamara]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Sun, 13.04.08 13:07, Sean McNamara (smcnam at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi, comments inline :)
>>
>> On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 18:34 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> writes:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> I believe /var/log/syslog has more error messages.
>>>>         
>>> You're right, thank you.
>>>       
>> When you start PA with --daemonize=true (the default
>> in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf), it outputs to /var/log/syslog. If you want
>> to see what's going on for a single console invocation of PA, you can
>> try
>> pulseaudio -vvvv --daemonize=false
>> It will then output all the debugging info to the console. The first v
>> is for errors; the second, warnings; the third, notices; the fourth,
>> debugging. Sometimes two v's isn't enough to get the full picture.
>>     
>
> Unless someone played around with daemon.conf -vv is all you need,
> it doesn't get any better by passing more v's. "notice" is the
> default, and adding one -v will increase the verbosity level by one
> step. Hence -v will get it upped to "info" and -vv to "debug". And
> ther's nothing btter than debug.
>
> Lennart
>
>   
Not to split hairs or anything, but, if someone were to do the following 
in daemon.conf:
log-level = error

would that mean that passing -vvvv in the command line would bump it 
from error -> warning -> notice -> info -> debug? Notice, four arrows, 
four v's. From the pulse-daemon.conf manpage:

"log-level= Log level, one of debug, info, notice, warning, error. Log 
messages with a lower log level than specified  here  are  not  logged.  
Defaults  to notice. The --log-level command line option takes 
precedence. The -v command line option might alter this setting."

I have set the log-level to error before, in other daemon programs, on a 
system with very constrained disk space, where /var was mounted on NAND. 
So I can imagine a marginal use case for this.

So, not to justify my point or anything, but -vvvv is the safest option 
to have someone try if you don't know their daemon.conf settings :) 
Otherwise, -vv with log-level = error would just go error -> warning -> 
notice, and not give us any infos or debugs. Even -vv with log-level = 
warning would only give us up to infos.

Of course, in this situation it seems the OP didn't modify the default 
conf files *at all* until we started to help him out, so -vv might've 
been a safe assumption. Splitting even more hairs ;-)

Thanks for weighing in on this Lennart.

-Sean