[pulseaudio-discuss] using PulseAudio without D-Bus?

[Crni Gorac]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 3:23 PM, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Tue, 2018-01-09 at 23:22 +0100, Crni Gorac wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 7:47 PM, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2018-01-09 at 09:47 +0100, Crni Gorac wrote:
>> > > Is it possible to specify somehow in PulseAudio config files that
>> > > D-Bus should not be used?  I achieved the effect by commenting out
>> > > loading Bluetooth and ConsoleKit modules in my default.pa file, but am
>> > > wondering is it possible to do the same in a more explicit way.
>> >
>> > It's possible to build PulseAudio without D-Bus support. If PulseAudio
>> > has been built with D-Bus support, PulseAudio will use it, there's no
>> > option to disable it.
>>
>> I see, thanks for the clarification.
>>
>> But if it is obviously able to work even if D-Bus is not present on
>> system, why would PulseAudio refuse to start if it's just that some of
>> its modules cannot find D-Bus?  Wouldn't it make more sense if in the
>> case I described above, any Bluetooth audio devices,
>> discoverable/reachable/whatever only through D-Bus, stay inaccessible,
>> but PulseAudio still keeps working with other available audio devices?
>
> If bluetooth support is requested in the startup configuration, it
> seems appropriate to fail the startup if the request can't be
> fulfilled.
>
> How have you ended up in this situation anyway? The bluetooth modules
> depend on bluez, so the operating system should install bluez if you
> request installation of the pulseaudio bluetooth modules, and bluez
> depends on dbus, so if bluez is installed, dbus should be installed
> too.

I've disabled D-Bus - I'm using neither Gnome nor KDE, but an
"old-school" window manager instead (it's Openbox), and I have no use
for D-Bus.  As expected, everything kept working fine, except that
PulseAudio was not started, and I realized that it's because of
several modules (module-bluetooth-policy, module-bluetooth-discover,
module-gconf, module-console-kit) that are loaded through my
default.pa are dependent on D-Bus.  As mentioned in my first message,
after commenting out these modules in default.pa, PulseAudio works
fine, but I was just wondering is there some more "proper" way to tell
PulseAudio to not use D-Bus.

In any case, I understand the reasoning, indeed it makes sense in this
situation to have to explicitly disable PulseAudio modules that
require D-Bus.  Thanks again for clarifications.