[systemd-devel] Please help me fix the fluidsynth.service file

[Fabian Greffrath]

Dear systemd developers,

I have a release-critical bug filed against the fluidsynth package in
Debian [1] that I don't quite understand. The bug is especially against
the fluidsynth.service file (attached to this mail).

To provide some background, fluidsynth is a MIDI daemon that can work
with different sound backends, most notably pulseaudio and pipewire.

Users report that the fluidsynth daemon is loaded before pulseaudio and
thus blocks the audio device, so that pulseaudio can only work on
"dummy output". Some users can reproduce this, others don't (including
myself). My guess is that I am using pipewire instead of pulseaudio and
so the correct order of the services is already granted by the
"After=pipewire.service" line. My next best guess is that expanding the
line to read "After=pipewire.service pulseaudio.service" will fix the
issue for both groups of users (one of the participants of the bug also
suggested this but got no replies).

The next strange issue is that reportedly even the Debian-gdm system
user already loads the fluidsynth daemon, blocking it during the
opening of the session for the actual human user. My guess here is that
the "WantedBy=default.target" line should rather get replaced by
something like "WantedBy=multi-user.target"?

I really don't know, especially because I cannot reproduce the issue in
the first place. Could you please do me a favour and review the
fluidsynth.service file so I can recommend a fix for this to upstream?

Thank you very much!

  - Fabian

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1053245
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