[pulseaudio-discuss] Make pulseaudio the default alsa device

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2016-10-14 at 14:49 -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote:
> On 14 October 2016 at 13:12, Felipe Sateler <fsateler at debian.org> wrote:
> > On 14 October 2016 at 12:13, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
> > > The relevant configuration snippet is already shipped in alsa-plugins
> > > upstream. The file in the source tree is
> > > 
> > >     pulse/99-pulseaudio-default.conf.example
> > > 
> > > and it gets installed to
> > > 
> > >     $datadir/alsa/alsa.conf.d/99-pulseaudio-default.conf.example
> > 
> > Yes, but that is not enabled by default. In debian we use the
> > following file to load that config automatically:
> > 
> > https://sources.debian.net/src/pulseaudio/9.0-4/debian/pulse.conf/
> 
> I realized that link may die in the future, so I'm copying the contents:
> 
> # PulseAudio alsa plugin configuration file to set the pulseaudio plugin as
> # default output for applications using alsa when pulseaudio is running.
> hook_func.pulse_load_if_running {
>     lib "libasound_module_conf_pulse.so"
>     func "conf_pulse_hook_load_if_running"
> }
> 
> @hooks [
>     {
>         func pulse_load_if_running
>         files [
>             "/usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf"
>         ]
>         errors false
>     }
> ]

If the system is configured to use pulseaudio, then I would prefer alsa
applications to fail if pulseaudio isn't running, rather than falling
back to whatever the default is if pulse-alsa.conf isn't loaded. It
makes debugging easier. But if the Debian alsa maintainers prefer to
fall back to non-pulseaudio configuration even when pulseaudio is
installed, then it seems reasonable to propose this to alsa upstream.
Maybe it could be an alternate "example" side-by-side with the current
pulseaudio-default.conf.example. Distributions could then easily choose
between the two approaches.

As a sidenote, I think it would be good to add much more commenting to
that file. The alsa configuration syntax is very hard to understand, so
it would be good to explain pretty much everything that is happening in
that file, line by line. I understand what the file does in general,
but I can't confidently explain almost any of the individual lines.

-- 
Tanu