[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio daemon initialization perjury

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Wed, 2015-10-07 at 12:21 -0600, Glenn Golden wrote:
> 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
> 
> 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.

Arch uses systemd's socket activation to start pulseaudio. To prevent
automatic starting, I think "systemctl --user disable
pulseaudio.socket" should do the trick.

The --start option is arguably obsolete on systems that use systemd to
manage the pulseaudio daemon, but it would be good if we could make it
less confusing.

-- 
Tanu