[pulseaudio-discuss] Not only autospawning, but all PA daemon startup of any kind appears impossible with PA trunk

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2010-05-16 at 01:45 -0400, Sean McNamara wrote:
> On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 12:24 AM, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
> > "User-configured" means that there's a server address configured either
> > by setting the PULSE_SERVER environment variable, by setting the
> > PULSE_SERVER X11 root window property, or by setting the default-server
> > option in client.conf. The logic is that if one of those is set, then
> > the server that the user wants to use is probably running on some other
> > machine, or even if the configuration points to the local machine, the
> > server is already running.
> 
> But that isn't always true. I can think of valid ways to set
> PULSE_SERVER in an environment where I still want to be able to start
> the PulseAudio server.

Are you aware of the fact that you can start pulseaudio without the
--start option? The manual page explains --start:

        "Start PulseAudio if it is not running yet. This is different
        from starting PulseAudio without --start which would fail if PA
        is already running. PulseAudio is guaranteed to be fully
        initialized when this call returns. Implies --daemon."

That explanation should be expanded to cover the behavior when the user
has configured an explicit server address, but my point is that I get
the feeling that you think that in order to start Pulseaudio you must
always use the --start option. The client configuration is not checked
when starting pulseaudio without the --start option.

If I got the wrong impression and you were aware of this already, then
I'd like to hear about concrete situations where it does make sense to
configure the server address in client.conf and still use the --start
switch for launcing a per-user daemon, or using the --start switch for
launcing a per-user daemon in an environment where the PULSE_SERVER
variable is set.

-- 
Tanu Kaskinen