[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio autospawn fails on macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)

[Tanu Kaskinen]

Hello,

Apparently autospawning has stopped working on new macOS versions:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105857

I cc'd a few people who have contributed to PulseAudio's macOS support
in the past (plus the bug reporter) - would any of you like to fix the
problem? The bug report mentions a workaround of setting a particular
environment variable, but it's not really good practice to set
environment variables from libpulse (it's not thread-safe, and messing
with applications' environment isn't nice anyway). According to [1],
using posix_spawn() instead of fork() and execv() would be the best
solution. That probably makes it impossible to use the "spawn API" that
can applications can use to run their own code at various steps of the
forking process, but it seems unlikely that applications would be using
the spawn API anyway (at least I don't know what it would be good for).

Another possible solution that comes to mind would be to replace
autospawning with starting pulseaudio as a service on macOS, similar to
how on Linux many distributions use systemd to start pulseaudio as a
user service instead of using the autospawning mechanism.

[1] http://sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/2017/6/5/Objective-C_and_fork_in_macOS_1013.html

-- 
Tanu

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