[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio daemon initialization perjury

[Glenn Golden]

The following observations were made on a setup (Arch Linux, x86_64, recently
synched, Arch pulseaudio package 7.0-2) on which the user desires that no
automated launch or respawning of the PA daemon should occur; the user
wishes to start the PA daemon only manually, without any behind the scenes
"assistance".

The user's client.conf contains only the following lines:

    default-server = 
    autospawn = no

First, verify via ps that no PA process is running. Then, from the commandline
as the (non-root) user:

    $ export PULSE_LOG=99
    $ pulseaudio -v -v -v -v -v --start 
    D: [pulseaudio] caps.c: Cleaning up privileges.
    D: [pulseaudio] conf-parser.c: Parsing configuration file \
       '/etc/pulse/daemon.conf'
    D: [pulseaudio] conf-parser.c: Parsing configuration file \
       '/home/XXX/.config/pulse/client.conf'
    E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.

Upon return to the shell prompt, interrogate the exit status:

     $ echo $?
     1

Now observe via ps that a PA daemon process is running:

     ...  S<sl 16:19 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no

and appears to be behaving normally in all respects.

At least three things in the above are worthy of head-scratching:

    1. The error message states "daemon startup failed", yet a pulseaudio
       process clearly did start, and appears to be running as a daemon process.

    2. The '--daemonize=no' shown on the ps line seems wrong, since the PA
       process -- which was reported as having failed to start -- is in fact
       running as a daemon process.

    3. The exit status from the startup command is nonzero (failure), yet the
       daemon was evidently started successfully.