subject:"Re\: pulseaudio related problems...."

On 02/21/2014 09:29 AM, Mario Lang wrote:
 I am sorry, both are not an option for me, since alsamixer is a ncurses
 program, and pavucontrol apparently requires $DISPLAY to be set.
 
 I guess that explains why the accessibility community has
 problems with PA.

What's wrong with the accessibility mechanisms provided in GNOME
(screen reader, magnifier)? (Serious question). I had the impression
that accessibility works rather well in GNOME and upstream actually
puts efforts into making that happen.

Cheers,

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-21 Thread Jean-Christophe Dubacq


Le 2014-02-21 09:57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz a écrit :

On 02/21/2014 09:29 AM, Mario Lang wrote:
I am sorry, both are not an option for me, since alsamixer is a 
ncurses

program, and pavucontrol apparently requires $DISPLAY to be set.

I guess that explains why the accessibility community has
problems with PA.


What's wrong with the accessibility mechanisms provided in GNOME
(screen reader, magnifier)? (Serious question). I had the impression
that accessibility works rather well in GNOME and upstream actually
puts efforts into making that happen.


Not the same accessibility. And the screen reader will not work if PA 
does not work.
This is quite difficult to debug remotely; if the user cannot describe 
the output of

commands, then we are doomed.


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/21/2014 11:38 AM, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote:
 Not the same accessibility. And the screen reader will not work if PA
 does not work.
 This is quite difficult to debug remotely; if the user cannot describe
 the output of
 commands, then we are doomed.

Doesn't this perfectly apply to ALSA as well? Having to rely on
using a screen reader when trying to debug problems with your sound
card sounds like a chicken-and-egg question to me.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-21 Thread Paul Gevers

On 21-02-14 10:57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 On 02/21/2014 09:29 AM, Mario Lang wrote:
 I am sorry, both are not an option for me, since alsamixer is a ncurses
 program, and pavucontrol apparently requires $DISPLAY to be set.

 I guess that explains why the accessibility community has
 problems with PA.
 
 What's wrong with the accessibility mechanisms provided in GNOME
 (screen reader, magnifier)? (Serious question). I had the impression
 that accessibility works rather well in GNOME and upstream actually
 puts efforts into making that happen.

I think the point of Mario is that people like him don't have a DE, but
work from console. I haven't checked, but apparently pavucontrol needs
an X-session to show itself. Of course ALSA has the same problem that if
you don't hear it you can't change it, but at least it doesn't require
an DE just to change your sound settings (to get it to work).

Maybe I haven't understood Mario's remark and I am fully wrong.

Paul




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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-21 Thread Salvo Tomaselli

Say that I use a screen reader. Someone helps me installing debian, configures 
the volume level to non-zero and then I am on my own.

After a while some package decides to install PA, then the audio is gone, then 
I'll need someone to come over a second time to help me with that.

So yes it applies to ALSA as well, but it's harder to configure and since it 
tends to get installed by surprise, it can break things in unexpected moments.

-- 

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senso, ragione ed intelletto intendesse che noi ne facessimo a meno.
-- Galileo Galilei

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA256

On 02/21/2014 11:56 AM, Paul Gevers wrote:
 I think the point of Mario is that people like him don't have a DE,
 but work from console. I haven't checked, but apparently
 pavucontrol needs an X-session to show itself. Of course ALSA has
 the same problem that if you don't hear it you can't change it, but
 at least it doesn't require an DE just to change your sound
 settings (to get it to work).

There are a couple of command line utilities to control Pulse Audio in
the package pulseaudio-utils. But I haven't used it that much to be
able to assess whether it provides the features Mario needs.

Cheers,

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-21 Thread Matthias Urlichs

Hi,

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
 There are a couple of command line utilities to control Pulse Audio in
 the package pulseaudio-utils. But I haven't used it that much to be
 able to assess whether it provides the features Mario needs.
 
pacmd allows you to enumerate outputs, set their volumes, and set the
default output. Among other things.

So an accessibility setup tool can easily say press one on the first
channel (paplay -d NAME AUDIOFILE), press two on the second, etc., and
then set the default to whatever the user actually heard (and wants).

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-21 Thread Mario Lang

Paul Gevers elb...@debian.org writes:

 On 21-02-14 10:57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 On 02/21/2014 09:29 AM, Mario Lang wrote:
 I am sorry, both are not an option for me, since alsamixer is a ncurses
 program, and pavucontrol apparently requires $DISPLAY to be set.

 I guess that explains why the accessibility community has
 problems with PA.
 
 What's wrong with the accessibility mechanisms provided in GNOME
 (screen reader, magnifier)? (Serious question). I had the impression
 that accessibility works rather well in GNOME and upstream actually
 puts efforts into making that happen.

 I think the point of Mario is that people like him don't have a DE, but
 work from console. I haven't checked, but apparently pavucontrol needs
 an X-session to show itself. Of course ALSA has the same problem that if
 you don't hear it you can't change it, but at least it doesn't require
 an DE just to change your sound settings (to get it to work).

 Maybe I haven't understood Mario's remark and I am fully wrong.

No, you have summarized it pretty neatly.
I just don't consider an X11 program a true alternative to a ncurses tool.

Having to get X11 + a11y configured just to be able to *properly* adjust
a volume slider is just hilarious.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/21/2014 03:28 PM, Mario Lang wrote:
 No, you have summarized it pretty neatly.
 I just don't consider an X11 program a true alternative to a ncurses tool.

Did you give pulseaudio-utils a try then? They don't require X.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-19 Thread Matthias Urlichs

Hi,

Helmut Grohne:
 Once you manually move a stream to a different sink, PA records your
 decision and the default sink is no longer relevant for that client. So
 when you move back, and restart your client, it is not affected by the
 default sink. What you propose does not work. Do you have an alternative
 in mind?
 
You either didn't say that you want to override user decisions,
or I misread your email.

In any case, if you look at PA's dbus page, the Stream Restore Extension is
documented and accessible; presumably you can use that to find the relevant
entries and delete them.

Finding that page took somewhat less time than writing this mail does,
so frankly I don't really understand what your problem is.


  Well, that's what libraries are for -- they encapsulate complicated things
  with an easy interface. Write that code once, use it anywhere.
 
 If PA is too crappy to interface directly, then it's not for me.

That does not follow. The whole point of libraries is to transform
high-level- into low(er)-level interfaces.

Your code uses malloc() even though the kernel only offers sbrk() and mmap().

Similarly, why do you use Gnome libraries if all these do is to transform
your calls into GTK calls? Or GTK if all they do (or rather, did) is to
call Xlib? Or Xlib, if all *that* does is to open a TCP or Unix-domain
stream socket and read/writes random(-seeming) bytes?

Same thing.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Chow Loong Jin

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:47:19AM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
 Hi,
 
 Ben Hutchings:
  So maybe the necessary change would be:
  - move the pulseaudio ALSA plugins and this config file into a new
binary package
  - rename the config file so it's not just an example
  - make pulseaudio recommend that binary package
  
 … except that when somebody does deinstall pulse without purging this
 package (and who would?), the conffile remains.
 Now your sound *really* doesn't work any more.

config files are not conffiles. This particular one appears to lie in
/usr/share/, so it's most definitely not a conffile.

 [...]

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Loong Jin


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le mardi 18 février 2014 à 00:09 +0100, Andrew Shadura a écrit : 
  Sure, you need to put the MAC address of your headset in your
  ~/.asoundrc. That's pretty convenient and user-friendly.
 
 Is it not?

No.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Lars Wirzenius

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:09:11AM +0100, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
 server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
 from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.

I think that attacking people isn't a good way to make one's point, or
to foster a constructive discussion. It also makes me, and probably
other people, feel uninterested in participating in any discussions on
this and other Debian mailing lists.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Matthias Urlichs

Hi,

Helmut Grohne:
  * Set a different sink to be the default sink. This doesn't move any
existing streams.

but it takes care of the Future part. For the past one, obviously
you'll have to ask PA to enumerate the sink's inputs and then move them
to the new default one by one.

The pavucontrol GUI doesn't do that currently, but it does do all the baby
steps so that you can accomplish this task manually with a couple of mouse
clicks.
So this shouldn't be *too* impossible to reproduce in your own code,
I'd assume.

 impossible to achieve such a basic task

Clearly not. Somewhat non-straightforward, OK, but then so is a lot of the
rest of our ecosystem.

 This isn't the only deficit, that is by design. Ever tried to get
 activity notification from PA for a particular sink (another thing alsa
 doesn't do at all)? It works, but it feels somewhat complicated:
 [...]

Well, that's what libraries are for -- they encapsulate complicated things
with an easy interface. Write that code once, use it anywhere.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Sune Vuorela

On 2014-02-18, Lars Wirzenius l...@liw.fi wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:09:11AM +0100, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
 server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
 from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.

 I think that attacking people isn't a good way to make one's point, or
 to foster a constructive discussion. It also makes me, and probably
 other people, feel uninterested in participating in any discussions on
 this and other Debian mailing lists.

I agree.

/Sune


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Andrew Shadura

Hello,

On 18 February 2014 09:33, Lars Wirzenius l...@liw.fi wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:09:11AM +0100, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
 server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
 from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.

 I think that attacking people isn't a good way to make one's point, or
 to foster a constructive discussion. It also makes me, and probably
 other people, feel uninterested in participating in any discussions on
 this and other Debian mailing lists.

Sorry if that looked like an attack. Probably that was a very poor
choice of words.

However, my point is still that I can't see how said server improves
the situation, my feeling is that it makes it only worse.

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  Andrew


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Jean-Christophe Dubacq

On 18/02/2014 10:57, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 Hello,
 
 On 18 February 2014 09:33, Lars Wirzenius l...@liw.fi wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:09:11AM +0100, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
 server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
 from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.
 
 I think that attacking people isn't a good way to make one's point, or
 to foster a constructive discussion. It also makes me, and probably
 other people, feel uninterested in participating in any discussions on
 this and other Debian mailing lists.
 
 Sorry if that looked like an attack. Probably that was a very poor
 choice of words.
 
 However, my point is still that I can't see how said server improves
 the situation, my feeling is that it makes it only worse.
 

This is obviously a feeling. Facts would be better.

Pulseaudio is not broken, not by large. Many linux users use it without
any problems; it is default on almost all distributions, including the
largest ones (Debian is the exception here). It may have bugs in
specific cases of hardware, but this is not the pulseaudio
maintainer/bug list address here.
-- 
Jean-Christophe Dubacq



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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Andrew Shadura

On 18 February 2014 11:37, Jean-Christophe Dubacq jcduba...@free.fr wrote:
 This is obviously a feeling. Facts would be better.

 Pulseaudio is not broken, not by large. Many linux users use it without
 any problems; it is default on almost all distributions, including the
 largest ones (Debian is the exception here). It may have bugs in
 specific cases of hardware, but this is not the pulseaudio
 maintainer/bug list address here.

As a matter of fact, PulseAudio never worked for me on Debian, every
time something brought it as a dependency the only way to fix the
sound was to purge pulseaudio package and install an alternative to
the package which pulled it.

The only time I has somehow working PulseAudio was when I installed
Ubuntu on a computer I was going to sell. However, it had some
extremely weird behaviour: music did play only as long as I was on the
same virtual console as the X server — as soon as I switched to vt1,
sound disappeared. To me, it's an obvious misfeature, which doesn't
exist when I'm using just ALSA and nothing more.

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  Andrew


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread John Paul Adrian Glaubitz

On 02/18/2014 11:51 AM, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 The only time I has somehow working PulseAudio was when I installed
 Ubuntu on a computer I was going to sell. However, it had some
 extremely weird behaviour: music did play only as long as I was on the
 same virtual console as the X server — as soon as I switched to vt1,
 sound disappeared. To me, it's an obvious misfeature, which doesn't
 exist when I'm using just ALSA and nothing more.

That works here just fine, just tested it while listening to music
on Youtube. You really must be doing something completely wrong
when you are having so much trouble with Pulse Audio.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Andrew Shadura

Hello,

On 18 February 2014 12:03, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote:
 That works here just fine, just tested it while listening to music
 on Youtube. You really must be doing something completely wrong
 when you are having so much trouble with Pulse Audio.

I don't know how could I do anything completely wrong if I changed no
configuration at all, it was what I've got by default. ALSA with no
configuration changes works just fine, I'd expect the same from
PulseAudio to consider it to be usable.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Emilio Pozuelo Monfort

On 18/02/14 11:51, Andrew Shadura wrote:
 The only time I has somehow working PulseAudio was when I installed
 Ubuntu on a computer I was going to sell. However, it had some
 extremely weird behaviour: music did play only as long as I was on the
 same virtual console as the X server — as soon as I switched to vt1,
 sound disappeared. To me, it's an obvious misfeature, which doesn't
 exist when I'm using just ALSA and nothing more.

That works fine nowadays.

Emilio


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Salvo Tomaselli

In data martedì 18 febbraio 2014 12.03.57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz ha 
scritto:
 That works here just fine, just tested it while listening to music
 on Youtube. You really must be doing something completely wrong
 when you are having so much trouble with Pulse Audio.
A certain number of users seem to be having troubles with pulseaudio, yet you 
keep insisting that it's just their fault and that since you can't reproduce 
(have you even tried?) then the problem doesn't exist.

We understood it, for you pulseaudio is completely bug free and all the 
problems about it are just the users. Do you need to repeat it many more 
times? Because I can see that for your opinion the number of people claiming 
to have encountered problems with it is completely irrelevant.

Cheers


-- 

Salvo Tomaselli

Io non mi sento obbligato a credere che lo stesso Dio che ci ha dotato di
senso, ragione ed intelletto intendesse che noi ne facessimo a meno.
-- Galileo Galilei

http://ltworf.github.io/ltworf/


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Axel Wagner

Hi,

Salvo Tomaselli tipos...@tiscali.it writes:
A certain number of users seem to be having troubles with pulseaudio, yet you
keep insisting that it's just their fault and that since you can't reproduce
(have you even tried?) then the problem doesn't exist.

We understood it, for you pulseaudio is completely bug free and all the
problems about it are just the users. Do you need to repeat it many more
times? Because I can see that for your opinion the number of people claiming
to have encountered problems with it is completely irrelevant.

In my opinion this is a really unfair assessment of what is happening.
It was mentioned *multiple* times, that if people observe bugs
in PA, they should open a bug report and I can really understand, that
it is conceived neither as fun, nor as productive, to discuss such
things on debian-devel, let alone with people who have the attitude
that just purging PA is a superior solution than fixing these bugs or
spending a few minutes configuring it (and don't get me started by
saying this shouldn't be necessary. It was acknowledged that some
thought might be put into making the default configuration better,
though there seem to be some problems, so better try to solve these).

Everyone acknowledges, that there might be bugs (this was also mentioned
multiple times), but to work with them in any productive way -- and be
it making the point, that PA is utterly and completely broken and should
be purged from debian -- you need some objective assessment of the
situation, not just anecdotal evidence of people, that say there *might*
have been a bug in PA, but we'll never know, because they just purged it
instead of troubleshooting it (or, by the way, people saying that it
works for them).

I would really wish, people would think a minute about what they really
want to achieve regarding PA, when making such claims:
• Make PA better? File a bug report
• Get PA to be the default, better integrated? File a bug report
• Throw PA out of debian? File a bug report, start a survey to assess in
an objective matter whether this is something the majority wants or even
start a GR
• Have less packages depend on or recommend PA, so that it is not
installed without explicitly doing so? File a bug report against
packages depending on or recommending PA. Though that might not be
perceived as very productive too.

After thinking about that, you should then think about if your personal
problem, non-problem, or mail in general does really anything to achieve
that goal. My personal goal is to kill this discussion or at least steer
it into a more productive direction. And I guess, it also won't achieve
this, but don't blame me for trying ;)

Best,

Axel

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread John Paul Adrian Glaubitz

On 02/18/2014 12:13 PM, Salvo Tomaselli wrote:
 In data martedì 18 febbraio 2014 12.03.57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz ha 
 scritto:
 That works here just fine, just tested it while listening to music
 on Youtube. You really must be doing something completely wrong
 when you are having so much trouble with Pulse Audio.
 A certain number of users seem to be having troubles with pulseaudio, yet you 
 keep insisting that it's just their fault and that since you can't reproduce 
 (have you even tried?) then the problem doesn't exist.

If you were really interested in fixing the problem, you wouldn't be
here posting on debian-devel but instead doing some experiments and
research to pinpoint the problem and writing a detailed and
useful bug report. Complaining on debian-devel doesn't do anything.

I always take the time to do fresh installations and run tests
in order to provide some more data instead of just it doesn't
work. You seem to forget all the time that we are all volunteers
and thus if you want to have a problem fixed, you need to invest
something as well.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Salvo Tomaselli

In data martedì 18 febbraio 2014 12.51.38, hai scritto:

Hi,

From my perspective, it's not that pulseaudio is broken and has to be purged 
from existence, it is that reports from users who can't get any audio are 
being responded to with: your fault, deal with it, pulseaudio works for me so 
it's not a bug, which IMHO is not a very constructive way of dealing with 
problems; in this way I doubt it will ever achieve a state where it just 
works.

 In my opinion this is a really unfair assessment of what is happening.
Is it? The specific person I was replying to asserted multiple times that the 
user was doing something wrong.

 • Make PA better? File a bug report
Get a bug report to be read instead of closed immediately? Post on debian-
devel I suppose.


-- 

Salvo Tomaselli

Io non mi sento obbligato a credere che lo stesso Dio che ci ha dotato di
senso, ragione ed intelletto intendesse che noi ne facessimo a meno.
-- Galileo Galilei

http://ltworf.github.io/ltworf/


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Steve Cotton

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 13:58 +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 On 02/17/2014 01:37 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
  Why can you not simply say something like: Well yes, there seem
  to be some problems and we will try to fix them if we can get hold
  of enough input. You DDs should be able to provide decent information
  to help track the problems down.
 
 Then why on earth aren't those people who are affected providing some
 more information?
 
 This is exactly what I was talking about: If your solution is
 unstalling an affected package, then you're obviously not
 interested in fixing it in the first place.

Hi Adrian,

I looked at all the bugs with volume in the title.  

Almost without exception, they're polite, the bug reporter has tried to
provide enough information, and many have offered to provide more
information and debugging.  Some include workarounds, and two
non-maintainers have helped triage the bugs.

But the offers of providing more information aren't being responded to.
I think the issues that non-maintainers can handle have been triaged, so
these are waiting for the maintainer to respond.

#539258 [n| | ] pulseaudio: Volume drops by 10 when skipping tracks on any 
application
Raised in 2009, last message is a is this happening in the current version 
asked in 2010.

#556971 [n| |=] pulseaudio does not remember volume settings, always set to 0
There are multiple workarounds in this bug from 2009 onwards, and some triage, 
but it seems no response from the maintainer.  The last message is that it's 
still reproducible 2013.

#615122 [n| | ] For HDA ATI onboard sound pulseaudio volume controls wrong alsa 
mixer control
Lots of description, no response from the maintainer.

#662900 [n|u|=] pulseaudio: Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 USB Audio Headset DB 
issue with Volume Scale
Lots of detail, a workaround, an offer to provide more info if needed, but no 
response.

#686667 [n| | ] /usr/bin/pactl: pactl set-sink-volume using - (minus) gives and 
error
Someone's replied with more information, but there's no message from the 
maintainer.

#726771 [n|u| ] pulseaudio does not synchronize volume levels with alsamixer 
for Asus Xonar D1
Someone's replied with more information, but there's no message from the 
maintainer.

#595135 [n|M| ] pulseaudio: Cached volume data causes abort previously-working 
USB DAC
Failed on upgrade, workaround supplied, someone's triaged, but there's no 
message from the maintainer.

#674935 [w| |=] pulseaudio: Disable flat volumes
#629987 [i| | ] pulseaudio: gnome-volume.control.pulse not show Mic rear
#728803 [i| | ] gnome-shell: Volume indicator disappears on startup and on 
reload and adjusting volume
#505835 [n| | ] Unable to change volume on remote pulseaudio daemon
#645002 [n| | ] Volume mute at every restart of pulseaudio (or restart of X)
#649568 [n| | ] pulseaudio: increasing volume manages all knobs causing a noise
#680645 [n| | ] pulseaudio: Pulse audio does not remember volume settings and 
allways load with 150%
#682731 [n| | ] gnome-shell fails to remember volume settings after 
shutdown/restart and default is only ~20%
#541538 [n|M| ] Sound volume jumps on play
No specific comments about these reports.


The balance of numbers resolved vs unresolved is unusual for volume,
in total src:pulseaudio has 167 resolved vs 187 outstanding.

#525572 [i| |☺♲] [pulseaudio] pulseaudio: volume muted after every boot
This one has a feedback and a fix from the maintainer.

#657117 [i|+|☺♲] [pulseaudio] pulseaudio: FTBFS on armel due to linking 
nonexistent volume library
Fixed by maintainer

#689171 [i| |♲] [pulseaudio] pulseaudio: After boot the volume is always reset 
to 100%
Resolved by submitter on the same day as submission

#557189 [n| |♲] [pulseaudio] rhythmbox: Volume control ridiculously sensitive
Resolved by submitter at the same time as reassigning to pulseaudio


Steve


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Matthias Urlichs

Hi,

Salvo Tomaselli:
  • Make PA better? File a bug report
 Get a bug report to be read instead of closed immediately? Post on debian-
 devel I suppose.
 
OK, so we all (or most of us, anyway) admit that the original bug which
sparked this discussion could have been handled better. Worse, it's a year
old and nobody from the Pulseaudio maintenance team
pkg-pulseaudio-de...@lists.alioth.debian.org seems to have looked at it,
or at least commented on it.  That shouldn't happen either.

(Note that I'm not blaming them, we are all volunteers and sometimes things
fall through the cracks.)

HOWEVER, the original bug report
  * does not contain any detail about the author's setup
(pactl list; lsusb; any speakers behind HDMI?)
  * does not say what the author tried, if anything
(Open pavucontrol and just unmute the damn audio?)
(Select the correct sound card as the default?)
(Tell his desktop environment to use pulse instead of
 direct-to-ALSA-hardware?)
  * does not read as if its author was particularly interested
in helping solve the problem -- that's what
I will spare you my rants, bye. says, doesn't it?

So.

Salvo: *Are* you willing to help resolve this problem?

-- 
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Roger Leigh

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:37:31AM +0100, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote:
 On 18/02/2014 10:57, Andrew Shadura wrote:
  Hello,
  
  On 18 February 2014 09:33, Lars Wirzenius l...@liw.fi wrote:
  On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:09:11AM +0100, Andrew Shadura wrote:
  Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
  server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
  from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.
  
  I think that attacking people isn't a good way to make one's point, or
  to foster a constructive discussion. It also makes me, and probably
  other people, feel uninterested in participating in any discussions on
  this and other Debian mailing lists.
  
  Sorry if that looked like an attack. Probably that was a very poor
  choice of words.
  
  However, my point is still that I can't see how said server improves
  the situation, my feeling is that it makes it only worse.
  
 
 This is obviously a feeling. Facts would be better.

I'm yet another of the herd who found that pulse was broken out of the
box, and that removing it made things work immediately.  In fact, it's
only worked on one out of the several systems I've tried it on, and even
there it was sufficiently annoying that it lasted only a few hours.
I'd say that whatever might be said of its benefits, it's been a net
negative overall for me, and I'd be quite happy for it to go away
entirely.


Regards,
Roger

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Jean-Christophe Dubacq

On 18/02/2014 12:13, Salvo Tomaselli wrote:
 In data martedì 18 febbraio 2014 12.03.57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz ha 
 scritto:
 That works here just fine, just tested it while listening to music
 on Youtube. You really must be doing something completely wrong
 when you are having so much trouble with Pulse Audio.
 A certain number of users seem to be having troubles with pulseaudio, yet you 
 keep insisting that it's just their fault and that since you can't reproduce 
 (have you even tried?) then the problem doesn't exist.
 
 We understood it, for you pulseaudio is completely bug free and all the 
 problems about it are just the users. Do you need to repeat it many more 
 times? Because I can see that for your opinion the number of people claiming 
 to have encountered problems with it is completely irrelevant.
 


Did you at least try to get to the point described in the wiki page:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/

If going step by step in this file does not make your Pulseaudio setup
work for you, then it is a bug in pulseaudio (the program or the
documentation).

If it works, then it's either a bug in pulseaudio (the debian package)
or another package (incompatible with pulseaudio; either the debian
packaging or the program).

Sincerely
-- 
Jean-Christophe Dubacq



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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le lundi 17 février 2014 à 13:24 +, Wookey a écrit : 
 The main complaint in this thread seems to be 'my sound worked with
 ALSA, but installing PA stopped/stops it working'. It seems to me that
 PA should try very hard to make sure that whatever output ALSA was using
 before is still used when PA is installed. Is there really no way to
 determine what that was? Somewhere else in this thread someone said 'if
 you have a .asound file then you will lose'. That seems harsh - why
 cannot the config in that be used to ensure PA outputs to whatever is
 'currently configured'?  Shouldn't the presence of such config _help_
 make it find the right output and levels?

Trying to guess what ALSA did and parsing ALSA configuration files
(which can be extremely complex) doesn’t sound like a recipe to write
reliable software.

I think the solution is to make PulseAudio more clever about default
output selection: 
  * video output being HDMI is an indication you should use HDMI →
this is very complex to implement since it requires integration
with X 
  * some devices appear in the system but are not actually connected
to something, maybe we can blacklist them 
  * PA can expose bugs in kernel drivers that did not appear when
you did not use the advanced features (e.g. latency control)
None of this is simple, but if we have to make something complex, it
should be the correct solution rather than trying to mimic what ALSA did
before.

 I am nearly as clueless as Mr Tille about audio and have also
 experienced regular problems with no output, no input, wrong audio card,
 vol sliders at zero, but I don't know to what degree PA is any worse than
 ALSA. I had got the hang of ALSAmixer, just in time for it to no longer
 solve my problems. The problem with PA seemed to be an extra layer of
 'magic' which was great if it picked the right things, but useless if it
 didn't. This thread helped me discover 'pavucontrol' which seems to be
 the thing that exposes the 'magic' in question, and has enabled me to
 get mic + hangouts working reliably (audio out was already working). 

KDE/GNOME users have been mostly unaffected since the volume control
application handled both setups for a while, and now relies completely
on PulseAudio (at least for GNOME).

When you have trouble with sound, at first:
* Click on the volume icon
* Click on the “volume control” button
* Select the HDMI or analog device, and set a few options
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the user to follow that
workflow.

-- 
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: :' :
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le mardi 18 février 2014 à 11:51 +0100, Andrew Shadura a écrit : 
 On 18 February 2014 11:37, Jean-Christophe Dubacq jcduba...@free.fr wrote:
  This is obviously a feeling. Facts would be better.
 
  Pulseaudio is not broken, not by large. Many linux users use it without
  any problems; it is default on almost all distributions, including the
  largest ones (Debian is the exception here). 

Debian is not the exception. Debian and Gentoo used to patch out
PulseAudio because we felt it was not ready, but we’ve been shipping it
by default since wheezy, and this thread is the first time I’ve heard of
major problems with that.

I notice an interesting correlation with the people complaining
endlessly about NM, GNOME, fd.o, systemd or whatever they want to
complain about today. I don’t think this is a coincidence, and this is
why I’m not putting too much weight in what has been said in that
thread.

 As a matter of fact, PulseAudio never worked for me on Debian, every
 time something brought it as a dependency the only way to fix the
 sound was to purge pulseaudio package and install an alternative to
 the package which pulled it.

We have a longstanding problem, which is that whenever PA is installed,
it is autostarted by applications using ALSA or GStreamer. This is not
the correct behavior, because pavucontrol might not be installed, and
the user might not have the idea to run it.

This is not a problem for desktop users, since the pulseaudio daemon is
started by the session manager, but I’ve been advocating against
autostarting. (Note that it can be easily disabled with a bit of
configuration.)

 The only time I has somehow working PulseAudio was when I installed
 Ubuntu on a computer I was going to sell. However, it had some
 extremely weird behaviour: music did play only as long as I was on the
 same virtual console as the X server — as soon as I switched to vt1,
 sound disappeared. To me, it's an obvious misfeature, which doesn't
 exist when I'm using just ALSA and nothing more.

This is configurable behavior; it can be better in some multi-user
environments.

-- 
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: :' :
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Helmut Grohne

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 10:17:53AM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
 but it takes care of the Future part. For the past one, obviously
 you'll have to ask PA to enumerate the sink's inputs and then move them
 to the new default one by one.
 
 The pavucontrol GUI doesn't do that currently, but it does do all the baby
 steps so that you can accomplish this task manually with a couple of mouse
 clicks.
 So this shouldn't be *too* impossible to reproduce in your own code,
 I'd assume.

Once you manually move a stream to a different sink, PA records your
decision and the default sink is no longer relevant for that client. So
when you move back, and restart your client, it is not affected by the
default sink. What you propose does not work. Do you have an alternative
in mind?

 Well, that's what libraries are for -- they encapsulate complicated things
 with an easy interface. Write that code once, use it anywhere.

If PA is too crappy to interface directly, then it's not for me. Thanks,
but no thanks. Sounds more like I am trying to use the wrong tool for my
task.

Helmut


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Kevin Chadwick

previously on this list Steve Langasek contributed:

 All
 software has bugs.  The difference is in how you handle them.

And how many!!! AND how many per 1000 lines AND how many run with
priviledges.

-- 
___

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)

In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Kevin Chadwick

previously on this list John Paul Adrian Glaubitz contributed:

 The problem is that many people who complain about PulseAudio issues
 are often prejudiced about it in the first place such that they aren't
 actually interested in having the problem fixed but rather just want
 to get rid of it and uninstall it. Trying to debug the problem in such
 cases is very difficult.
 
  And to the extent that Debian users are unhappy with pulseaudio as a
  default, it's because others have been trying to blame the user for the
  problems instead of constructively engaging to *fix* pulseaudio.  
 
 I think the reservations are mutual. If your attention as a user is
 I'm too lazy to take a second to look into how PulseAudio actually
 works and what box I have to check., you can't expect us on the
 other side to be happy to help as well.

What's that phrase about assumption again? ;-)

I'm sure Salvo has, but it is worth checking the PCM in the mixer as
it kept being set occasionally to 0 for me on multiple mythbuntu boxes.

Though if you don't need the features and don't have the time to set up
jackd then why not remove. I assume pulseaudio as the default has some
ease of use advantage or feature though as I know jackd is better for
pro audio.

It hasn't happened since I removed pulseaudio but I did that because it
wanted polkit or dbus system-services and without polkit permissions or
dbus system-services enabled sound didn't work anyway. I was rather glad
when I found adding myself to the audio group meant I got Alsa audio
back. Not sure why the audio group was empty by default, surely it
should fall back to Alsa?


-- 
___

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

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In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-18 Thread Wouter Verhelst

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 05:25:13PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
 Le lundi 17 février 2014 à 13:24 +, Wookey a écrit : 
  The main complaint in this thread seems to be 'my sound worked with
  ALSA, but installing PA stopped/stops it working'. It seems to me that
  PA should try very hard to make sure that whatever output ALSA was using
  before is still used when PA is installed. Is there really no way to
  determine what that was? Somewhere else in this thread someone said 'if
  you have a .asound file then you will lose'. That seems harsh - why
  cannot the config in that be used to ensure PA outputs to whatever is
  'currently configured'?  Shouldn't the presence of such config _help_
  make it find the right output and levels?
 
 Trying to guess what ALSA did and parsing ALSA configuration files
 (which can be extremely complex) doesn’t sound like a recipe to write
 reliable software.

ALSA did it, and ALSA pretty reliably works for me.

Yes, that's a bit tongue-in-cheek. But to say that this is difficult,
we should therefore not even try is stupid. Maybe a better way would be
to help the ALSA developers write a way to help parse configuration
files?

Oh wait.

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___config.html

Right.

-- 
This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.

If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you
will not go to space today.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Tim Retout

On 17 Feb 2014 06:54, Andreas Tille andr...@an3as.eu wrote:
 I have no idea whether this remark is helpful but this thread inspired
 me to give pulseaudio another chance on one of my boxes (I had
 deinstalled previously on all boxes where sound stoped working at some
 point in time randomly).  Despite I gave pavucontrol and pasystray a try
 to configure pulseaudio my box remained silent (in *any* control I
 tried).  It seems as long as there is no button saying please give me
 any sound this is not helpful.s

You are in a wonderful situation - you have a reproducible bug, and an easy
workaround until it gets fixed properly.  Please, please report and debug
it so that we don't have to have these threads on debian-devel.

Kind regards,

Tim

Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/17/2014 08:44 AM, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
 ]] John Paul Adrian Glaubitz 
 
 So, if your computer has several sounds cards - which is the case when
 you have both a sound card and HDMI audio - how is PulseAudio supposed
 to know which sound card to use? This is in no way different to plain
 ALSA.
 
 Use all of them.  Most of them most likely aren't connected to anything,
 so sending a signal there is harmless.

I don't know whether this is a good idea. What if I want to listen to
something over my headphones which I don't others want to hear and
I know about this feature. I expect the sound to be over headphones
only, yet it's blasting over the internal speakers as well and
everyone in the room can hear me as well.

 FWIW, sound works in 99% of the cases right after a fresh install.
 
 Please provide the data you base this claim on, from a statistically
 significant sample of Debian installations.

No problem. Will do it later today when I have some time. I'll collect
the default desktop, the amount of users and the number of machines
and the amount of support requests regarding audio if that's ok.

 Problems like the one described by Christian usually occur on systems
 which have been undergone several configuration changes and upgrades,
 i.e. old systems.
 
 If the configuration you get from install + upgrade is different than
 just installing a newer version, that's a bug.

Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your home
directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

Hi,

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
 As an example, most users who use systemd probably still restart
 services using /etc/init.d/service restart, just because it works.
 
It's simply less to type if you don't otherwise like bash-autocomplete. :-P

 It's also noteworthy that complains about PulseAudio usually come from
 advanced users. I haven't heard my mom complain about sound problems
 on her netbook running Ubuntu, for example.
 
… or Debian. Data point: yesterday I did a new install on an UEFIendish
Samsung laptop which Ubuntu's grub was completely unable to grok. Debian …
just worked. And after upgrading to Jessie it works even better. ;-)

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

Hi,

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
  Use all of them.  Most of them most likely aren't connected to anything,
  so sending a signal there is harmless.
 
 I don't know whether this is a good idea. What if I want to listen to
 something over my headphones which I don't others want to hear and
 I know about this feature. I expect the sound to be over headphones
 only, yet it's blasting over the internal speakers as well and
 everyone in the room can hear me as well.
 
ITYM and I *don't* know about this feature.

I don't think that the first thing you'd ever play on your system is
something private. Most likely this will be the desktop environment's
startup sound; you don't usually wear headphones when it does that.

 Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your home
 directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.
 
So: test with a fresh user.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Chow Loong Jin

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:51AM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
 Hi,
 
 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
  As an example, most users who use systemd probably still restart
  services using /etc/init.d/service restart, just because it works.
  
 It's simply less to type if you don't otherwise like bash-autocomplete. :-P

Really? I've been using service service restart which autocompletes well
too, and is even less to type. Works well with systemd, upstart, and sysvinit.

 [...]

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread darkestkhan

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 7:57 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote:
On 02/17/2014 08:37 AM, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
It might just be that DDs/computer experts just have more customized setups
that break in interesting ways when effort isn't spent porting the
configuration
changes to a new system. What follows is $new_thing sucks because $feature
in
$old_thing that I customized half a decade ago and forgot about doesn't
work. If
I, a DD/'computer expert' can't get it working, how could it ever be suitable
for a layman?

Exactly what I have been thinking all the time. And I find the argument
all DDs are computer experts, so if they can't get it working it
must be broken a particularly bad one.

Just because someone is a computer expert doesn't mean they
automatically understand how each peace of new software works. And
people who are advanced with computers usually tend to follow their
own old pattern when trying to fix problems instead of being open
to new methods. Thus, chances are they are trying to fix a problem
the wrong way.

As an example, most users who use systemd probably still restart
services using /etc/init.d/service restart, just because it works.

It's also noteworthy that complains about PulseAudio usually come from
advanced users. I haven't heard my mom complain about sound problems
on her netbook running Ubuntu, for example.

It is also noteworthy that when most of average users getting this kind
of problems would go back to Windows (hey, at least audio works there)
instead of fiddle around with audio configuration or starting debugger.
And most people simply need audio - today practically everyone is doing
$Something while listening to music. And surely you don't expect your
$Average_Joe to know about reportbug{,-ng}, or do you?

Why would anyone want to debug software when simple solution to problem
is getting rid of said software? Unless someone has some interest in using
said software (or just wants to fix the bug) I don't see this happening.

My personal experience with pulseaudio is that it works - as long as
I'm listening
to only one audio stream at once (I have only one audio device) - which means
that for me pulseaudio doesn't work (I'm notoriously listening to more than 2
streams at once). And I'm NOT interested in debugging it - I have
better things to
do with my time than to fix buggy software created by others and for some
reason forcefully shoved (if not spoon-fed) onto users (especially
when alsa just
works).

I'm not saying that pulseaudio has no use case but most users don't need it.

(Speaking from my own personal experience here, with a 6-year-old Ubuntu
installation upgraded ~12 times with ~3 botched upgrades, and an even older
$HOME).

I'm also convinced that it should be possible to have a working default
pulse setup. Emitting sound on all available sound output by default,
and making sure that the level isn't zero upon install, seems like a
sensible thing to do.

Ubuntu appears to get it right. I haven't seen a fresh Ubuntu installation
that
had broken sound for a very long time now.

Exactly my second argument. If Pulse-Audio was actually broken as it is
often described, Launchpad's bugtracker would be full of complaints, is
it?

When very simple workaround that fixes this issue in 99% percent of cases
exists I would expect this to happen.

darkestkhan
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

Hi,

Chow Loong Jin:
  It's simply less to type if you don't otherwise like bash-autocomplete. :-P
 
 Really? I've been using service service restart which autocompletes well
 too, and is even less to type. Works well with systemd, upstart, and sysvinit.
 
I intentionally disable bash autocomplete when I'm root.
It does too many things that may lock up when I'm trying to fix problems.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Stephan Seitz


On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 04:26:31PM +0800, Chow Loong Jin wrote:

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:51AM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:

 As an example, most users who use systemd probably still restart
 services using /etc/init.d/service restart, just because it works.
It's simply less to type if you don't otherwise like 
bash-autocomplete. :-P
Really? I've been using service service restart which autocompletes 
well too, and is even less to type. Works well with systemd, upstart, 
and sysvinit.


But only if you have the package bash-completion installed and activated.  
/etc/init.d/service is always working with auto completion.


Shade and sweet water!

Stephan

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Brian May

On 17 Feb 2014 19:33, darkestkhan darkestk...@gmail.com wrote:
 It is also noteworthy that when most of average users getting this kind
 of problems would go back to Windows (hey, at least audio works there)

In my case, was the reverse. When Windows audio didn't work (incorrectly
says nothing connected to the port and won't let me select it) I went back
to Debian with Pulse Audio (hey, at least audio works there).

If configuring Pulse Audio really is too hard for some people, maybe we
need some sort of automatic trouble shooting GUI to help?

Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Andreas Tille

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:02:56AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 
 Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your home
 directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.

I just want to confirm that I have no file ~/.asoundrc in my home dir
and I never had since I have no dea that this file existed (if not some
program might have created this magically).

BTW, besides the trick to deinstall pulseaudio if the sound does not
work I learned another trick to remove /var/lib/alsa/asound.state and
restart /etc/init.d/alsatab.  I have no idea whether there is some
strange interconnection.  The mere fact that I know that less about
sound on Linux might tell you that I simply expect things to work and
I'm not willing to debug this (since I seem to be one of the few people
who are able to work without music).

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Josselin Mouette

Le samedi 15 février 2014 à 22:12 +0100, Salvo Tomaselli a écrit : 
 Well I am now biased against pulseaudio. But let's look at the facts: it 
 comes 
 by default, in the last 3 desktop machines that I've installed, it prevented 
 any audio to be heard.
 Am I so unreasonable to think that since it comes by default, it should come 
 with a working configuration as well?

The problem is that it is not possible to autodetect everything.

The primary (and AFAIR only) cause of “no sound with PulseAudio” that I
have encountered is that it doesn’t know whether you want to hear sound
over the HDMI output or over the jack. Both appear to the system as two
different devices. So PA just selects one (I haven’t investigated how it
does the choice) and often gets it wrong.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Norbert Preining

Hi Adrian,

On Mo, 17 Feb 2014, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 Exactly what I have been thinking all the time. And I find the argument
 all DDs are computer experts, so if they can't get it working it
 must be broken a particularly bad one.

Well, the amount of DDs mentioning that on their computer PA does
not work, uninstalling it gave a working configuration etc etc,
can you *simply* ignore this fact?

Why can you not simply say something like: Well yes, there seem
to be some problems and we will try to fix them if we can get hold
of enough input. You DDs should be able to provide decent information
to help track the problems down.

Instead you are taking the position: On all the computers installed
around me in this surrounding everything worked, so it cannot be a 
problem of PA, but of you.

I hope you rethink your attitude towards maintainance of software.

Norbert


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/17/2014 01:37 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
 Why can you not simply say something like: Well yes, there seem
 to be some problems and we will try to fix them if we can get hold
 of enough input. You DDs should be able to provide decent information
 to help track the problems down.

Then why on earth aren't those people who are affected providing some
more information?

This is exactly what I was talking about: If your solution is
unstalling an affected package, then you're obviously not
interested in fixing it in the first place.

If you want me to help you with your problem, you need to provide
something I can work on. Just claiming it doesn't work isn't helping
in this situation, I don't have a crystal ball I can consult in this
case.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Wookey

+++ John Paul Adrian Glaubitz [2014-02-16 14:55 +0100]:
 On 02/16/2014 01:05 PM, Alessio Treglia wrote:
  On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:50 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
  glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote:
  Well, I'm sorry but I would have probably reacted the same. You were not
  reporting a bug, you were just ranting.
  
  If you are willing to help, I am willing to cooperate and
  send you configuration and details about my system.
  
  It is perhaps a matter of sensitivity, definitely it does not sound as
  ranting to me though.
 
 Sorry, but no. Re-read his bug report, he was incredibly impolite.

No it wasn't. He explicitly said 'I'll spare you my rants', and _didn't_
put in a big rant about how PA is a PITA. Yes it had some 'tone' due to
be filed just after being very annoyed by some problem. Sometimes that
happens. As a maintiner you have to look past that. The very next
message said 'I'll provide details if someone will help debug'. That
should have been taken at face value, and then this bug might have
actually helped solve the problem.

 Again, I would have reacted the same way. You reap what you sow.

Which perhaps goes some way to explaining why this sort of problem has
been around for such a long time.

Please try to make some allowance for grumpy (but competent) people
filing bugs when their sound broke and see if we can get useful info and
hopefully better default behaviour which will reduce the incidence of
such problems.

Wookey
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/17/2014 02:03 PM, Wookey wrote:
 No it wasn't. He explicitly said 'I'll spare you my rants', and _didn't_
 put in a big rant about how PA is a PITA. Yes it had some 'tone' due to
 be filed just after being very annoyed by some problem. Sometimes that
 happens. As a maintiner you have to look past that. The very next
 message said 'I'll provide details if someone will help debug'. That
 should have been taken at face value, and then this bug might have
 actually helped solve the problem.

Did you read Anton's reply at all [1]? He said, he isn't the original
maintainer of the package, but he just looked at the bug because
it was tagged as RC during the Wheezy freeze. In fact, I talked
with the current maintainer of PulseAudio yesterday and he said
he could need some help.

Anton could not reproduce the bug, hence he lowered the severity
to prevent this bug to be a show stopper for the release. I do
not see anything wrong with that.

Adrian

 [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/02/msg00779.html

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Wookey

+++ Josselin Mouette [2014-02-17 11:06 +0100]:
 Le samedi 15 février 2014 à 22:12 +0100, Salvo Tomaselli a écrit : 
  Well I am now biased against pulseaudio. But let's look at the facts: it 
  comes 
  by default, in the last 3 desktop machines that I've installed, it 
  prevented 
  any audio to be heard.
  Am I so unreasonable to think that since it comes by default, it should 
  come 
  with a working configuration as well?
 
 The problem is that it is not possible to autodetect everything.
 
 The primary (and AFAIR only) cause of “no sound with PulseAudio” that I
 have encountered is that it doesn’t know whether you want to hear sound
 over the HDMI output or over the jack. Both appear to the system as two
 different devices. So PA just selects one (I haven’t investigated how it
 does the choice) and often gets it wrong.

The main complaint in this thread seems to be 'my sound worked with
ALSA, but installing PA stopped/stops it working'. It seems to me that
PA should try very hard to make sure that whatever output ALSA was using
before is still used when PA is installed. Is there really no way to
determine what that was? Somewhere else in this thread someone said 'if
you have a .asound file then you will lose'. That seems harsh - why
cannot the config in that be used to ensure PA outputs to whatever is
'currently configured'?  Shouldn't the presence of such config _help_
make it find the right output and levels?

I am nearly as clueless as Mr Tille about audio and have also
experienced regular problems with no output, no input, wrong audio card,
vol sliders at zero, but I don't know to what degree PA is any worse than
ALSA. I had got the hang of ALSAmixer, just in time for it to no longer
solve my problems. The problem with PA seemed to be an extra layer of
'magic' which was great if it picked the right things, but useless if it
didn't. This thread helped me discover 'pavucontrol' which seems to be
the thing that exposes the 'magic' in question, and has enabled me to
get mic + hangouts working reliably (audio out was already working). 

No I haven't filed bugs. Yes I am a bad person, but as remarked
upthread, I don't want to file bugs of the form 'Waaa, my sound doesn't
work', and I don't know enough to say much more useful than that, so I
just assume I'm doing it wrong and one day I'll work out how to get it
going. Maybe there are a lot of us in this situation. Fixing things in
this situation requires tolerance by bug submitters and receivers for
shirtiness and low-quality bug reports, which has not really been in
evidence so far. I hope we can improve on that now that people have a
slightly better understanding of the situation.

Wookey
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Wookey

+++ John Paul Adrian Glaubitz [2014-02-17 14:19 +0100]:
 On 02/17/2014 02:03 PM, Wookey wrote:
  No it wasn't. He explicitly said 'I'll spare you my rants', and _didn't_
  put in a big rant about how PA is a PITA. Yes it had some 'tone' due to
  be filed just after being very annoyed by some problem. Sometimes that
  happens. As a maintiner you have to look past that. The very next
  message said 'I'll provide details if someone will help debug'. That
  should have been taken at face value, and then this bug might have
  actually helped solve the problem.
 
 Did you read Anton's reply at all [1]? 

I did.

 Anton could not reproduce the bug, hence he lowered the severity
 to prevent this bug to be a show stopper for the release. I do
 not see anything wrong with that.

Neither do I.

But my general point stands: This bug report was not 'incredibly
impolite', and even if it had been, the way it was dealt with means we
missed the opportunity to glean anything useful from the situation. You
would do better to reflect on that rather than keep trying to justify
it.

(And you are a very argumentative man. I guess I'll leave this here.
Have the last word if you must.)

Wookey
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Bjørn Mork

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de writes:
 On 02/17/2014 01:37 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
 Why can you not simply say something like: Well yes, there seem
 to be some problems and we will try to fix them if we can get hold
 of enough input. You DDs should be able to provide decent information
 to help track the problems down.

 Then why on earth aren't those people who are affected providing some
 more information?

 This is exactly what I was talking about: If your solution is
 unstalling an affected package, then you're obviously not
 interested in fixing it in the first place.

 If you want me to help you with your problem, you need to provide
 something I can work on. Just claiming it doesn't work isn't helping
 in this situation, I don't have a crystal ball I can consult in this
 case.

The goal of most users will be have sound, not install pulseaudio.
This defines both the problem and the solution, from the users
perspective.

A package which appear to be non-functional at install time is not
likely to receive any bug reports at all.  Feel free to whine about
that.


Bjørn


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

Hi,

Bjørn Mork:
 The goal of most users will be have sound, not install pulseaudio.

Most users will have PA installed anyway, so the second goal is already
met. :-P

 A package which appear to be non-functional at install time is not
 likely to receive any bug reports at all.  Feel free to whine about
 that.
 
OK, I'll give every one of these people a Bluetooth headset instead.
(No that does not mean I'll actually pay for them …)

Tried to use one of these with ALSA lately?

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Norbert Preining

On Mo, 17 Feb 2014, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
 OK, I'll give every one of these people a Bluetooth headset instead.
 (No that does not mean I'll actually pay for them …)
 
 Tried to use one of these with ALSA lately?

Man, don't you get the point?

Yes, everyone here agrees that PA is in principle more powerful
than ALSA.

But this is not the point *at*all*. It is about misconfiguration
on *new* installations, so that *normal* sound output, not
fancy bluetooth hardware, is not working.

Why do all of you PA pushers don't understand that we are not
saying that PA is incapable of doing all this and also deliver
a Pizza to my door. But it does not help anyone if nobody knows
where to phone for the pizza.

Norbert


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

Hi,

Norbert Preining:
  Tried to use one of these with ALSA lately?
 
 Man, don't you get the point?
 
I do. You didn't get mine, which was that if you have a choice of
(a) get PA working by at least filing a bug, or (b) get audio working by 
uninstalling pulseaudio, then me presenting you with a nice shiny set of
Bluetooth headphones will effectively remove the second choice from
consideration.  ;-)

That being said, I agree that I could have written that mail in such a way
that its tongue-in-cheek-iness would be more obvious. Sorry 'bout that.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Thomas Goirand

On 02/17/2014 03:57 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 Exactly what I have been thinking all the time. And I find the argument
 all DDs are computer experts, so if they can't get it working it
 must be broken a particularly bad one.

No, that's not what I wrote. I wrote that it's too complicated for the
average user, and that in some situations, it doesn't work out of the
box. Not that it's broken: I do believe pulse can work (it works for me,
and I'm reasonably happy with it, so...).

Your tendency to rewrite things that I write in a wrong way is annoying.

Thomas


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Andreas Beckmann

On 2014-02-17 14:55, Bjørn Mork wrote:
 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de writes:
[...]
 If you want me to help you with your problem, you need to provide
 something I can work on. Just claiming it doesn't work isn't helping
 in this situation, I don't have a crystal ball I can consult in this
 case.
 
 The goal of most users will be have sound, not install pulseaudio.
 This defines both the problem and the solution, from the users
 perspective.

I can do a lot of bug triaging ... build problems, upgrade problems,
ICEs, segmentation faults, ...
But I'm absolutely clueless if it comes to sound. What additional
information could be helpful? I don't know. Sound works. I'd actually
have to check whether I have pulseaudio installed ...

Since collection of more information seems to be the problematic part, a
bug-script could be helpful, so I just filed #739294.

Thereafter maybe the quickfix solution (apt-get remove pulseaudio) could
be replaced (or amended) by

  reportbug pulseaudio
  # maybe this is already sufficient to discover and fix common
misconfigurations


Andreas

PS: Install the bug script etc. in *all* related packages. Users usually
pick the wrong one to report gainst. (dh_bugfiles -A)


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/17/2014 03:47 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
 Your tendency to rewrite things that I write in a wrong way is annoying.

You wrote:

=

However, the fact that multiple DDs, which I do consider all as computer
experts, failed to have a working setup, can only lead to the conclusion
that there's something wrong which has to be fixed, especially if it
comes by default with Debian. If DDs can't go around the issues and just
feel that it's not worth spending more time, imagine with someone that
isn't a computer expert...

=

I wrote:

=

Exactly what I have been thinking all the time. And I find the argument
all DDs are computer experts, so if they can't get it working it
must be broken a particularly bad one.

=

I don't see how I am rewriting things in a wrong way. Do you want to
argue about the exact meaning of broken now?

Now, since this isn't really leading anywhere, could we maybe focus
on how we could help Sjoerd with the PulseAudio packaging? I found
a new contributor on Mentors who is willing to join the packaging
team and we can help by doing reviews or providing bug reports/patches.

There is a new version of pavucontrol on Mentors which I (or Sjoerd)
are going to sponsor.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Thomas Goirand

On 02/17/2014 04:02 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your home
 directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.

Oh !!!

Now I do remember why my pulseaudio system works. It's because I
followed to the letter this howto:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/

Well, having a look at it, it seems it changed quite a bit. But that's
what I followed.

The question is: why don't we have this by default in Debian? Why would
it be up to the user to configure each and every software to use the
correct audio stack? IMO, it'd be great if we had consistency.

I hope this helps,
Cheers,

Thomas


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Andrew Shadura

Hello,

On 17 February 2014 15:47, Matthias Urlichs sm...@smurf.noris.de wrote:
  Tried to use one of these with ALSA lately?

 Man, don't you get the point?

 I do. You didn't get mine, which was that if you have a choice of
 (a) get PA working by at least filing a bug, or (b) get audio working by
 uninstalling pulseaudio, then me presenting you with a nice shiny set of
 Bluetooth headphones will effectively remove the second choice from
 consideration.  ;-)

That's not true; Bluetooth headphones work flawlessly with plain ALSA
(as I noted in my previous mail which somehow didn't reach the list).

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Darac Marjal

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:00:38PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
 On 02/17/2014 04:02 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
  Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your home
  directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.
 
 Oh !!!
 
 Now I do remember why my pulseaudio system works. It's because I
 followed to the letter this howto:
 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/
 
 Well, having a look at it, it seems it changed quite a bit. But that's
 what I followed.
 
 The question is: why don't we have this by default in Debian? Why would
 it be up to the user to configure each and every software to use the
 correct audio stack? IMO, it'd be great if we had consistency.

I guess the problem might be detecting what's installed. Either the
sound client programs need to say If Pulse is installed use it, else
use ALSA, else use OSS, else use ... or Pulse needs to say upon
installation, delve into the configuration of these programs and change
their default sound API.

Technically, it's a touch difficult.



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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Thomas Goirand

On 02/17/2014 11:03 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 I don't see how I am rewriting things in a wrong way. Do you want to
 argue about the exact meaning of broken now?

Indeed, words are important. For me, when I read broken it means bugs
upstream, and I'm convince the problem is configuration, which is a
completely different thing.

Thomas


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/17/2014 05:25 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
 On 02/17/2014 11:03 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 I don't see how I am rewriting things in a wrong way. Do you want to
 argue about the exact meaning of broken now?
 
 Indeed, words are important. For me, when I read broken it means bugs
 upstream, and I'm convince the problem is configuration, which is a
 completely different thing.

Ok, just take it with a grain of salt next time. You know what I wanted
to express which is that just because someone is a DD, they do not
automatically know the solution to every problem.

In any case, since you mentioned that you have an .asoundrc in your
$HOME, it might be noteworthy to add what people using PulseAudio
should have in this file:

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}

pcm.!default {
type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

This basically tells ALSA applications - which don't know anything
about PA - to use the PulseAudio-ALSA backend. Thus, such applications
think they use an ALSA device when, in fact, they use PulseAudio.

These show up as ALSA in the Applications tab in the PA sound
preferences during playback.

It might be sensible to add a global asound.conf in /etc/ to resolve
this issue for every ALSA-only application.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Jean-Christophe Dubacq


Le 2014-02-17 16:00, Thomas Goirand a écrit :

On 02/17/2014 04:02 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your 
home

directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.


Oh !!!

Now I do remember why my pulseaudio system works. It's because I
followed to the letter this howto:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/

Well, having a look at it, it seems it changed quite a bit. But 
that's

what I followed.

The question is: why don't we have this by default in Debian? Why 
would

it be up to the user to configure each and every software to use the
correct audio stack? IMO, it'd be great if we had consistency.


Probably because, Debian is about choice, which makes such 
wide-ranging changing
impossible. Because pulseaudio is not assumed, because udev is not 
assumed, one can
not put a configuration in /etc/asound.conf that says to use pulse. 
Because that would
remove choice, which is important to these non-PA users. Remark that it 
is important
to them especially because we cannot configure this by default, so PA 
does not work
(by default), so does not work, so it is important to be able to go 
without PA :-/


In my experience, sound not working in PA was due to one program using 
the alsa driver

while the other uses PA, and not saying Alsa to use PA for mixing.

Sincerely,
--
JC Dubacq


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Ben Hutchings

On Mon, 2014-02-17 at 18:05 +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 On 02/17/2014 05:25 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
  On 02/17/2014 11:03 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
  I don't see how I am rewriting things in a wrong way. Do you want to
  argue about the exact meaning of broken now?
  
  Indeed, words are important. For me, when I read broken it means bugs
  upstream, and I'm convince the problem is configuration, which is a
  completely different thing.
 
 Ok, just take it with a grain of salt next time. You know what I wanted
 to express which is that just because someone is a DD, they do not
 automatically know the solution to every problem.
 
 In any case, since you mentioned that you have an .asoundrc in your
 $HOME, it might be noteworthy to add what people using PulseAudio
 should have in this file:

That's all desktop users, by default, right?

 pcm.pulse {
 type pulse
 }
 
 pcm.!default {
 type pulse
 }
 
 ctl.!default {
 type pulse
 }

I added something like that a while ago, and have been happy with PA
since I did so.  But at this point in time, it should not be necessary
to add it.

 This basically tells ALSA applications - which don't know anything
 about PA - to use the PulseAudio-ALSA backend. Thus, such applications
 think they use an ALSA device when, in fact, they use PulseAudio.
 
 These show up as ALSA in the Applications tab in the PA sound
 preferences during playback.
 
 It might be sensible to add a global asound.conf in /etc/ to resolve
 this issue for every ALSA-only application.

Yes, this really should be present by default.

Ben.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Ben Hutchings

On Mon, 2014-02-17 at 18:15 +0100, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote:
 Le 2014-02-17 16:00, Thomas Goirand a écrit :
  On 02/17/2014 04:02 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
  Well. You can't blame PulseAudio if you have an .asoundrc in your 
  home
  directory which configures your sound card incorrectly.
 
  Oh !!!
 
  Now I do remember why my pulseaudio system works. It's because I
  followed to the letter this howto:
  
  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/
 
  Well, having a look at it, it seems it changed quite a bit. But 
  that's
  what I followed.
 
  The question is: why don't we have this by default in Debian? Why 
  would
  it be up to the user to configure each and every software to use the
  correct audio stack? IMO, it'd be great if we had consistency.
 
 Probably because, Debian is about choice, which makes such 
 wide-ranging changing
 impossible. Because pulseaudio is not assumed, because udev is not 
 assumed, one can

At this point, udev can be assumed (outside of chroots and containers
that have no devices of their own).  You cannot install an offical
kernel package without it.  popcon shows an installation rate of 99.62%.

 not put a configuration in /etc/asound.conf that says to use pulse. 
[...]

Well, not in the basic ALSA packages.  But it should be possible for the
pulseaudio package to install a configuration file that does this.

In fact, there is this:

$ cat /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/99-pulseaudio-default.conf.example 
# Default to PulseAudio

pcm.!default {
type pulse
hint {
show on
description Default ALSA Output (currently PulseAudio Sound Server)
}
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}
$

But it has no effect because its filename extension is '.example' not
'.conf'.   It's installed by libasound2-plugins, which contains the
pulseaudio plugins and others.

So maybe the necessary change would be:
- move the pulseaudio ALSA plugins and this config file into a new
  binary package
- rename the config file so it's not just an example
- make pulseaudio recommend that binary package

Or alternately:
- move just this config file into a new binary package, depending on
  libasound2-plugins
- make pulseaudio recommend that binary package

Ben.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Wouter Verhelst

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 08:57:53AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 On 02/17/2014 08:37 AM, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
  It might just be that DDs/computer experts just have more customized 
  setups
  that break in interesting ways when effort isn't spent porting the 
  configuration
  changes to a new system. What follows is $new_thing sucks because $feature 
  in
  $old_thing that I customized half a decade ago and forgot about doesn't 
  work. If
  I, a DD/'computer expert' can't get it working, how could it ever be 
  suitable
  for a layman?
 
 Exactly what I have been thinking all the time.

No, I don't buy that argument. It is based on the incorrect assumption
that all computer experts want to configure *every* part of their
system.

I'll buy that many experts do more configuring than other people, and
yes, in some cases that might result in the defaults no longer doing
what they should be doing. But given the number of people who seem to
have taken the step of going sound isn't working, oh pulseaudio is
installed, let's throw it out, I doubt *all* of these have been
customizing their sound in minute detail. After all, let's face it, not
all computer experts are audiophiles.

 And I find the argument all DDs are computer experts, so if they
 can't get it working it must be broken a particularly bad one.

Granted.

But I'd like to make a few observations:
- I didn't even know there was a way to configure pulseaudio. I have had
  cases of pulseaudio being installed without me knowing that was the
  case, when I did a few obvious things like running dpkg -l on some
  relevant packages, and not seeing any configuration files; so that
  didn't get me to the right place.
- alsamixer is a fairly low-level mixer tool written specifically for
  alsa. When pulseaudio is installed, however, the default mixer visible
  in alsamixer is the single pulse slider. While it's possible to select
  the 'hardware' alsa mixer (with F6), the fact that really
  ALSA-specific tools don't even really manage ALSA anymore (by default)
  is confusing.
- If the low-level driver does the right thing (in this case, produce
  audio) while the magic layer on top does not, then the magic layer on
  top is a menace. Whether the layer on top has good reasons for making
  guesses or not does not matter; if it does a worse job than the
  low-level driver, clearly something is wrong.

It has been my experience that pulse has in fact done a worse job at
getting things to Just Work(TM) on the hardware that I own.

[...]

-- 
This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.

If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you
will not go to space today.

  -- http://xkcd.com/1133/


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Vincent Bernat

 ❦ 17 février 2014 15:50 CET, Andrew Shadura and...@shadura.me :

 I do. You didn't get mine, which was that if you have a choice of
 (a) get PA working by at least filing a bug, or (b) get audio working by
 uninstalling pulseaudio, then me presenting you with a nice shiny set of
 Bluetooth headphones will effectively remove the second choice from
 consideration.  ;-)

 That's not true; Bluetooth headphones work flawlessly with plain ALSA
 (as I noted in my previous mail which somehow didn't reach the list).

Sure, you need to put the MAC address of your headset in your
~/.asoundrc. That's pretty convenient and user-friendly.
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Olaf Titz

 The primary (and AFAIR only) cause of no sound with PulseAudio that I
 have encountered is that it doesnt know whether you want to hear sound
 over the HDMI output or over the jack. Both appear to the system as two
 different devices. So PA just selects one (I havent investigated how it
 does the choice) and often gets it wrong.

I actually have a device where PA selects the wrong one and apparently
does not know how to select the other one.
It's an USB stick marked TerraTec (0ccd:0077) which has a combined
TOSlink/analog jack output and allows to switch between those two
modes. No matter what I select in pavucontrol, I always get a red
light and no electronic signal out of that jack. It works in plain
ALSA.

(Did not file a bug yet because the machine runs an ancient Ubuntu
LTS, will have to check a newer one.)

Olaf


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Andrew Shadura

Hello,

On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 22:51:20 +0100
Vincent Bernat ber...@debian.org wrote:

  I do. You didn't get mine, which was that if you have a choice of
  (a) get PA working by at least filing a bug, or (b) get audio
  working by uninstalling pulseaudio, then me presenting you with a
  nice shiny set of Bluetooth headphones will effectively remove the
  second choice from consideration.  ;-)
 
  That's not true; Bluetooth headphones work flawlessly with plain
  ALSA (as I noted in my previous mail which somehow didn't reach the
  list).

 Sure, you need to put the MAC address of your headset in your
 ~/.asoundrc. That's pretty convenient and user-friendly.

Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.

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  Andrew


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Vincent Bernat

 ❦ 18 février 2014 00:09 CET, Andrew Shadura and...@shadura.me :

  That's not true; Bluetooth headphones work flawlessly with plain
  ALSA (as I noted in my previous mail which somehow didn't reach the
  list).

 Sure, you need to put the MAC address of your headset in your
 ~/.asoundrc. That's pretty convenient and user-friendly.

 Is it not? It's much more convenient than fighting with a broken audio
 server which was written by a bunch of not really sane people suffering
 from some extreme form of a NIH syndrome.

I started using PulseAudio when I had to use a bluetooth headset. Worked
out of the box.
-- 
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

Hi,

Ben Hutchings:
 So maybe the necessary change would be:
 - move the pulseaudio ALSA plugins and this config file into a new
   binary package
 - rename the config file so it's not just an example
 - make pulseaudio recommend that binary package
 
… except that when somebody does deinstall pulse without purging this
package (and who would?), the conffile remains.
Now your sound *really* doesn't work any more.

Fixable by always removing the file in postrm, but this example shows that
the problem is far from trivial.

-- 
-- Matthias Urlichs


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-17 Thread Helmut Grohne

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:02:56AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 I don't know whether this is a good idea. What if I want to listen to
 something over my headphones which I don't others want to hear and
 I know about this feature. I expect the sound to be over headphones
 only, yet it's blasting over the internal speakers as well and
 everyone in the room can hear me as well.

Heh. Can you tell me how to get this working? This application was the
number one reason for me to try PA (cause alsa doesn't do stream
re-routing).

So the task basically is remove all present and future streams from a
sink (sink is PA-speak for audio output). There are a few options that
can help to achieve this task:

 * Set a different sink to be the default sink. This doesn't move any
   existing streams.
 * Unplug the sound card. This works with USB, PA will detect it and all
   present and future streams are moved. I figured that this works less
   well with onboard sound cards.
 * Remove the PA module driving the sink. Oh well that was alsa, now you
   have the null sink and no sound at all.
 * Cork the sink. Well this doesn't move streams, it blocks them,
   nothing is moved.
 * Mute the sink. Again nothing is moved.

So I figured, even after a considerable amount of investigation I found
it impossible to achieve such a basic task even with the help of the
very welcoming #pulseaudio IRC channel. (If you ever have problems with
PA, one of the best things you can do is go to their IRC channel.)

This isn't the only deficit, that is by design. Ever tried to get
activity notification from PA for a particular sink (another thing alsa
doesn't do at all)? It works, but it feels somewhat complicated:

 * You connect to your session dbus.
 * You ask PA for its dbus address.
 * You connect to the PA dbus. (Yes, it has its own dbus.)
 * You look up all sinks. They are indexed by *numbers*, not names.
   Those numbers are not stable. (This is one of the core critics of PA
   proponents made against alsa, it's hilarious.)
 * You watch the relevant signal.
 * You invoke a PA-specific method that tells PA to actually start
   generating the notifications you are interested in.

In defense, let me also tell you *why* this is so complex:

 * PA is using a separate dbus, because that allows it to use a TCP
   transport, so this control mechanism becomes network transparent,
   which it wouldn't be on the session bus.
 * PA is not emitting these notifications by default, because that was
   deemed to be unacceptable for performance.

So rather than a buggy software, I see a software that is broken by
design in important aspects. As far as I can see, you cannot just fix
these issues without breaking tons of stuff. You'd be rewriting large
parts of PA and its API. In addition, the amount of knowledge about PA
internals required to achieve these tasks is impressive. I don't think
that an average user or even software developer has this knowledge.

Helmut


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Vitaliy Filippov


I'd like to take the opportunity to plug the pasystray package,
available in testing.

IMO it provides a friendlier interface to advanced pulse features than
pavucontrol.


Btw, does normal KDE mixer work with PA? I remember that when I tried it,  
all ALSA channel volume levels were replaced by single pulseaudio volume  
there.


P.S: I also think PA is mostly a useless wrapper. It anyway sends  
everything to ALSA. All basic features work without it, and in most cases  
it's everything that needed.


--
With best regards,
  Vitaliy Filippov


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Alessio Treglia

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:50 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote:
 Well, I'm sorry but I would have probably reacted the same. You were not
 reporting a bug, you were just ranting.

If you are willing to help, I am willing to cooperate and
send you configuration and details about my system.

It is perhaps a matter of sensitivity, definitely it does not sound as
ranting to me though.

 How about writing a proper bug report without being so hostile?

He was trying to do that, he got neither help nor guidance from the
package's actual maintainer.

Cheers.

-- 
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Debian Developer | ales...@debian.org
Ubuntu Core Developer| quadris...@ubuntu.com
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread John Paul Adrian Glaubitz

On 02/16/2014 01:05 PM, Alessio Treglia wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:50 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
 glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote:
 Well, I'm sorry but I would have probably reacted the same. You were not
 reporting a bug, you were just ranting.
 
 If you are willing to help, I am willing to cooperate and
 send you configuration and details about my system.
 
 It is perhaps a matter of sensitivity, definitely it does not sound as
 ranting to me though.

Sorry, but no. Re-read his bug report, he was incredibly impolite.
Again, I would have reacted the same way. You reap what you sow.

I happened to watch a FOSDEM talk on exactly that matter yesterday,
I highly recommend it for anyone who participates in open source
communities [1].

Adrian

 [1]
http://video.fosdem.org/2014/Janson/Saturday/Software_Archaeology_for_Beginners.webm

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer

On Saturday 15 February 2014 09:22:53 Christian PERRIER wrote:
[snip] 
 I happened to come on this thread and finally learned that purging
 pulseaudio from one's system seems to be the way to get sound working
 back again in some situations. And, guess what? This is exactly the
 problem I was having for weeks now;..:-)
 
 As sound stuff is kind of black magic for me, I had no idea where to
 investigate. Random tests, and attempts to look at various log files
 weren't leading anywhere and I was left with no sound...:-)
 
 Until I came up on this thread and just apt-get purge pulseaudio and
 then, voilà, after a reboot, sound is working again in my KDE
 environment.
 
 But, doh, I feel like a Windows user doing some voodoo black magic,
 and fixing things by rebooting. Not really comfortable.
 
 So, well, I can certaily file a bug report about pulseaudio but I'm
 not really sure if I can be really helpful in investigating
 itbecause it will mostly be the kind of bug report I hate, as a
 maintainer : no real information and just things don't work stuff.
 
 So, before doing so: will that be helpful?
 
 Indeed, I don't really see anything in pulseaudio bugs about this so I
 assume it can be helpful but I prefer checking first whether I can
 make a more helpful bug report...:-)

Christian: while I do the same and keep pulseaudio uninstalled on my systems, 
I *think* kmix gained functionality like pavucontrol in the latests releases. 
Maybe it's worth trying it (in case you didn't already).

Kinds regards, Lisandro.

-- 
Los chicos tienen un mayor dominio de la tecnología (y las habilidades y
lenguaje que eso implica) que los adultos con los que se relacionan. Por lo
general saben más que sus propios padres, sus docentes, sus pediatras,
psicólogos, que los políticos y funcionarios de sus comunidades. Eso afectó la
autoridad que tenía un adulto para habilitar al mundo.
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  http://www.luispescetti.com/regale-su-obra/

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
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http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com/


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Anton Gladky

Hi,

On 02/16/2014 12:39 AM, Salvo Tomaselli wrote:
 I said: If you are willing to help, I am willing to cooperate and send you 
 configuration and details about my system.
 
 To which I got this answer: No, thanks. See my previous answer. (I think 
 referring to the fact that he isn't an expert).
 
 Ok the bug had a bit of attitude, but I did offer to cooperate and run tests 
 and send configuration files/logs, the offer was turned down.

talking to any open source developers please always keep in mind, that
they are mostly volunteers of their projects and you can just _ask_ to
do something, but not to require. And yes, reasonable patches are always
welcome.

Returning back to the bug #702884. Pay attention, you filed a bug of
critical severity during the period of the deep freeze before Wheezy
release. Many of us were working hard to release Wheezy as quicker as
possible, so we had to deal often with bugs/packages, which we do not
personally maintain.

I honestly tried to reproduce the bug, but could not. That is why I
tagged the bug correspondingly and reduced the severity, letting an
original maintainer to do his job. It was also recommended you to check
an existing bugs in pulseaudio. What is wrong?

I am not going to spend my time any more for this particular question,
sorry.

Anton




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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Paul Gevers

Hi all,

On 15-02-14 21:11, Russ Allbery wrote:
 All I'm saying, and all I think Steve is saying, is that audio not working
 out of the box is some kind of bug.  That's fine -- software has bugs.  We
 all know that.  It might be an important bug, it might be a normal bug, it
 might be a wishlist bug, or it might be a wontfix bug, but something the
 user reasonably expected to work didn't work, so that's a bug.

Just to add a reminder on behalf of a11y: this not-out-of-the-box thing
is specifically bad for people that *need* sound to be able to navigate
their computer. They usually are not able to recover without sighted
help because the tools to do it also fail to speak to them.

I don't know if it exists or is feasible, but it would be great to have
an as-fail-safe-as-reasonable-possible PulseAudio configuration reset
option that can be promoted on the accessibility Wiki [1].

Paul
[1]



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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Chris Bannister

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 10:17:52AM +0100, Christian PERRIER wrote:
 Quoting John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de):
  On 02/15/2014 09:22 AM, Christian PERRIER wrote:
   So, before doing so: will that be helpful?
  
  I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
  have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with
  one input jack and one output jack and any application using it just
  has to find the sound card and output its audio signal.
 
 I'm one of these people. I indeed don't remember installing pulseaudio
 voluntarily. It probably came out as a Recommends from something else

Same here, I didn't ask for it to be installed, and I have
APT::Install-Recommends false;

 (my system runs unstable, with KDE as DE and hasn't been reinstalled
 since.well, maybe woody? :-)))

I'm not running a DE, just FVWM, so don't really see why pulseaudio was
installed on a system if it was a DE dependency.

  So, in order to be able to properly configure PulseAudio, install
  pavucontrol 

# apt-get install pavucontrol
[...]
0 upgraded, 17 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 7,500 kB of archives.
After this operation, 38.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n

Wow! All this to configure a piece of software I didn't ask for, when my
set up was working perfectly before it was installed.

Please, let's try and use a bit of common sense here.

-- 
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the 
oppressing. --- Malcolm X


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Andreas Tille

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 09:05:42PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
  I'll agree with that.  Audio really should just work unless the hardware
  configuration is particularly strange.

+1

 So, if your computer has several sounds cards - which is the case when
 you have both a sound card and HDMI audio - how is PulseAudio supposed
 to know which sound card to use? This is in no way different to plain
 ALSA.

I have no idea whether this remark is helpful but this thread inspired
me to give pulseaudio another chance on one of my boxes (I had
deinstalled previously on all boxes where sound stoped working at some
point in time randomly).  Despite I gave pavucontrol and pasystray a try
to configure pulseaudio my box remained silent (in *any* control I
tried).  It seems as long as there is no button saying please give me
any sound this is not helpful.s

My trouble might be connected to my choice to use xfce and perhaps it is
wrong to blame pulseaudio exclusively.

I know that I should go to some user list to ask for help and do not
expect it here.  I just want to confirm that there is some problem with
pulseaudio even if you try to configure it and my personal way to deal
with this is to kick pulseaudio again.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Thomas Goirand

On 02/17/2014 02:52 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
 Hi,
 
 On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 09:05:42PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 I'll agree with that.  Audio really should just work unless the hardware
 configuration is particularly strange.
 
 +1

+1

 So, if your computer has several sounds cards - which is the case when
 you have both a sound card and HDMI audio - how is PulseAudio supposed
 to know which sound card to use? This is in no way different to plain
 ALSA.
 
 I have no idea whether this remark is helpful but this thread inspired
 me to give pulseaudio another chance on one of my boxes (I had
 deinstalled previously on all boxes where sound stoped working at some
 point in time randomly).  Despite I gave pavucontrol and pasystray a try
 to configure pulseaudio my box remained silent (in *any* control I
 tried).  It seems as long as there is no button saying please give me
 any sound this is not helpful.s
 
 My trouble might be connected to my choice to use xfce and perhaps it is
 wrong to blame pulseaudio exclusively.
 
 I know that I should go to some user list to ask for help and do not
 expect it here.  I just want to confirm that there is some problem with
 pulseaudio even if you try to configure it and my personal way to deal
 with this is to kick pulseaudio again.
 
 Kind regards
 
Andreas.

I do use pulse myself, and I have learnd how to go around its issues,
and kind of like pulse.

However, the fact that multiple DDs, which I do consider all as computer
experts, failed to have a working setup, can only lead to the conclusion
that there's something wrong which has to be fixed, especially if it
comes by default with Debian. If DDs can't go around the issues and just
feel that it's not worth spending more time, imagine with someone that
isn't a computer expert...

I'm also convinced that it should be possible to have a working default
pulse setup. Emitting sound on all available sound output by default,
and making sure that the level isn't zero upon install, seems like a
sensible thing to do.

Thomas


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Chow Loong Jin

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 03:09:25PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
 [...]
 However, the fact that multiple DDs, which I do consider all as computer
 experts, failed to have a working setup, can only lead to the conclusion
 that there's something wrong which has to be fixed, especially if it
 comes by default with Debian. If DDs can't go around the issues and just
 feel that it's not worth spending more time, imagine with someone that
 isn't a computer expert...

It might just be that DDs/computer experts just have more customized setups
that break in interesting ways when effort isn't spent porting the configuration
changes to a new system. What follows is $new_thing sucks because $feature in
$old_thing that I customized half a decade ago and forgot about doesn't work. If
I, a DD/'computer expert' can't get it working, how could it ever be suitable
for a layman?

(Speaking from my own personal experience here, with a 6-year-old Ubuntu
installation upgraded ~12 times with ~3 botched upgrades, and an even older
$HOME).

 I'm also convinced that it should be possible to have a working default
 pulse setup. Emitting sound on all available sound output by default,
 and making sure that the level isn't zero upon install, seems like a
 sensible thing to do.

Ubuntu appears to get it right. I haven't seen a fresh Ubuntu installation that
had broken sound for a very long time now.

-- 
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Loong Jin


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Tollef Fog Heen

]] John Paul Adrian Glaubitz 

 So, if your computer has several sounds cards - which is the case when
 you have both a sound card and HDMI audio - how is PulseAudio supposed
 to know which sound card to use? This is in no way different to plain
 ALSA.

Use all of them.  Most of them most likely aren't connected to anything,
so sending a signal there is harmless.

 FWIW, sound works in 99% of the cases right after a fresh install.

Please provide the data you base this claim on, from a statistically
significant sample of Debian installations.

 Problems like the one described by Christian usually occur on systems
 which have been undergone several configuration changes and upgrades,
 i.e. old systems.

If the configuration you get from install + upgrade is different than
just installing a newer version, that's a bug.

-- 
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UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread Andreas Tille

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 08:44:28AM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
 
 If the configuration you get from install + upgrade is different than
 just installing a newer version, that's a bug.

+1

BTW, my experience with reinstalling pulseaudio and breaking my sound by
doing so was after a purge of all pulseaudio configurations.  So my
configuration should have been considered as fresh.

I admit that while I was addressed as computer expert because of beeing
a DD I would not claim this for myself if it comes to sound.  I'm
always just crossing my fingers that sound works and this very simple
mindes approach worked always when pulseaudio was not involved and only
in rare cases with pulseaudio.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-16 Thread John Paul Adrian Glaubitz

On 02/17/2014 08:37 AM, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
 It might just be that DDs/computer experts just have more customized setups
 that break in interesting ways when effort isn't spent porting the 
 configuration
 changes to a new system. What follows is $new_thing sucks because $feature in
 $old_thing that I customized half a decade ago and forgot about doesn't work. 
 If
 I, a DD/'computer expert' can't get it working, how could it ever be suitable
 for a layman?

Exactly what I have been thinking all the time. And I find the argument
all DDs are computer experts, so if they can't get it working it
must be broken a particularly bad one.

Just because someone is a computer expert doesn't mean they
automatically understand how each peace of new software works. And
people who are advanced with computers usually tend to follow their
own old pattern when trying to fix problems instead of being open
to new methods. Thus, chances are they are trying to fix a problem
the wrong way.

As an example, most users who use systemd probably still restart
services using /etc/init.d/service restart, just because it works.

It's also noteworthy that complains about PulseAudio usually come from
advanced users. I haven't heard my mom complain about sound problems
on her netbook running Ubuntu, for example.

 (Speaking from my own personal experience here, with a 6-year-old Ubuntu
 installation upgraded ~12 times with ~3 botched upgrades, and an even older
 $HOME).
 
 I'm also convinced that it should be possible to have a working default
 pulse setup. Emitting sound on all available sound output by default,
 and making sure that the level isn't zero upon install, seems like a
 sensible thing to do.
 
 Ubuntu appears to get it right. I haven't seen a fresh Ubuntu installation 
 that
 had broken sound for a very long time now.

Exactly my second argument. If Pulse-Audio was actually broken as it is
often described, Launchpad's bugtracker would be full of complaints, is
it?

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/15/2014 09:22 AM, Christian PERRIER wrote:
 So, before doing so: will that be helpful?

I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with
one input jack and one output jack and any application using it just
has to find the sound card and output its audio signal.

It's not as simple as that anymore. Modern audio codecs have tons of
options and volume controls, and - from my experience - most problems
to PulseAudio relate to the sound card being incorrectly configured.

To resolve this problem, people then try to use tools like alsamixer
and naturally, since alsamixer doesn't know anything about PulseAudio,
it cannot fully configure it.

So, in order to be able to properly configure PulseAudio, install
pavucontrol or use the sound preferences in GNOME3 or MATE (with
the package mate-media-pulse being installed).

Then run pavucontrol or the MATE/GNOME sound preferences and make
sure that:

* the proper sound card has been selected (it might be set to
  HDMI audio if your graphics card has HDMI)
* the proper sound output/input you want to use
  is selected and not muted
* the sound card is set to Analog Duplex Stereo

When using MATE, make sure you are actually the PulseAudio control
panel, not the old ALSA-type one, those are not the same.

There are some pitfalls when using PulseAudio and expecting it to
behave exactly like plain ALSA. PulseAudio provides much more features
and possible configuration settings, so one has to be sure to get
these right.

I also highly recommend asking in the #pulse-audio channel on FreeNode
(if I remember that that was the proper name of the channel). Those
people are awesome and it usually takes a few minutes and you have
your problem resolved.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Christian PERRIER

(admitedly, d-d is not the right place.I make the promise I won't
steal the list for too long but, hey, this thread has already been
useful to at least one person, so let's try to make it even mor euseful)

Quoting John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de):
 On 02/15/2014 09:22 AM, Christian PERRIER wrote:
  So, before doing so: will that be helpful?
 
 I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
 have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with
 one input jack and one output jack and any application using it just
 has to find the sound card and output its audio signal.

I'm one of these people. I indeed don't remember installing pulseaudio
voluntarily. It probably came out as a Recommends from something else
(my system runs unstable, with KDE as DE and hasn't been reinstalled
since.well, maybe woody? :-)))

 So, in order to be able to properly configure PulseAudio, install
 pavucontrol or use the sound preferences in GNOME3 or MATE (with
 the package mate-media-pulse being installed).

IIRC, using the KDE sound preferences, I was not seeing any sound
card *at all*...until I removed Pulseaudio. I can for sure try
reinstalling the package again and check what happens, with some
guidance, for sure.


 When using MATE, make sure you are actually the PulseAudio control
 panel, not the old ALSA-type one, those are not the same.

Indeed, no idea if the standard KDE sound control thingie is one of
these things, indeed and old one or a new one...;-)

(I'm very good at playing the dumb userI have plenty of those at work)

By the way: thanks for your detailed answer. I'm sure that will be
helpful and maybe not only for meeven if we're quickly running OT here...



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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Ean Schuessler

- John Paul Adrian Glaubitz glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote:

 I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
 have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with
 one input jack and one output jack and any application using it just
 has to find the sound card and output its audio signal.
...
 So, in order to be able to properly configure PulseAudio, install
 pavucontrol or use the sound preferences in GNOME3 or MATE (with
 the package mate-media-pulse being installed).

I have occasionally seen PulseAudio select the Null Output as
the default device and stick that way. If the user doesn't know 
about pavucontrol then they may never figure this out.


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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Steve Langasek

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 09:58:05AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
 have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with
 one input jack and one output jack and any application using it just
 has to find the sound card and output its audio signal.

If any configuration is required, that is a bug in pulseaudio.

-- 
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Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/15/2014 08:42 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
 If any configuration is required, that is a bug in pulseaudio.

According to that logic, half of the software in Debian is broken.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Russ Allbery

Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org writes:
 On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 09:58:05AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

 I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
 have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with one
 input jack and one output jack and any application using it just has to
 find the sound card and output its audio signal.

 If any configuration is required, that is a bug in pulseaudio.

I'll agree with that.  Audio really should just work unless the hardware
configuration is particularly strange.

Now, the *severity* of the bug of course may depend on how many people are
affected, etc.

(FWIW, pulseaudio has always worked great out of the box for me with no
configuration required, but then so has every sound system on Linux in
about the past five years.  Before that, it was a mess, but a bit before
pulseaudio, around the time ALSA became the thing everyone was using, my
problems generally went away and haven't returned, even through a few
changes in how sound was implemented.)

-- 
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

On 02/15/2014 08:59 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
 Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org writes:
 On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 09:58:05AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 
 I think most people simply don't configure PulseAudio correctly. They
 have the assumption that sound cards are still simple devices with one
 input jack and one output jack and any application using it just has to
 find the sound card and output its audio signal.
 
 If any configuration is required, that is a bug in pulseaudio.
 
 I'll agree with that.  Audio really should just work unless the hardware
 configuration is particularly strange.

So, if your computer has several sounds cards - which is the case when
you have both a sound card and HDMI audio - how is PulseAudio supposed
to know which sound card to use? This is in no way different to plain
ALSA.

FWIW, sound works in 99% of the cases right after a fresh install.
Problems like the one described by Christian usually occur on systems
which have been undergone several configuration changes and upgrades,
i.e. old systems.

Adrian

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Russ Allbery

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de writes:
 On 02/15/2014 08:59 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:

 I'll agree with that.  Audio really should just work unless the
 hardware configuration is particularly strange.

 So, if your computer has several sounds cards - which is the case when
 you have both a sound card and HDMI audio - how is PulseAudio supposed
 to know which sound card to use? This is in no way different to plain
 ALSA.

I can think of several ways to handle that.  I don't know how many of them
PulseAudio already implements.  For example, if it's a common problem to
have the sound going through HDMI audio when people have a sound card,
maybe the default in that case should be to use the sound card rather than
HDMI.  Or (and I don't know if that capability is present) maybe it should
default to sending the sound to all cards.

All I'm saying, and all I think Steve is saying, is that audio not working
out of the box is some kind of bug.  That's fine -- software has bugs.  We
all know that.  It might be an important bug, it might be a normal bug, it
might be a wishlist bug, or it might be a wontfix bug, but something the
user reasonably expected to work didn't work, so that's a bug.

That doesn't mean ALSA didn't also have bugs.  Of course it did.  :)

 FWIW, sound works in 99% of the cases right after a fresh install.
 Problems like the one described by Christian usually occur on systems
 which have been undergone several configuration changes and upgrades,
 i.e. old systems.

Which would be a... wait for it... bug in our upgrade handling.  :)  But
again, I have no idea the severity.

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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Matthias Urlichs

Hi,

Russ Allbery:
 PulseAudio already implements.  For example, if it's a common problem to
 have the sound going through HDMI audio when people have a sound card,
 maybe the default in that case should be to use the sound card rather than
 HDMI.  Or (and I don't know if that capability is present) maybe it should
 default to sending the sound to all cards.
 
Yes, PA can do that.

Shouldn't even be too difficult to implement.

I'll file a wishlist bug.
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....

2014-02-15 Thread Steve Langasek

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 08:50:18PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
 On 02/15/2014 08:42 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
  If any configuration is required, that is a bug in pulseaudio.

 According to that logic, half of the software in Debian is broken.

There's a difference between broken and buggy.  But it *is* the case
that we expect packages in Debian to be usable, out of the box, as soon as
they're installed.

Whenever someone says I installed pulseaudio and my sound stopped working,
the right answer is *not* here are some tools that let you reconfigure
pulseaudio.  The right answer is let's figure out how to fix pulseaudio so
that this doesn't happen.

And to the extent that Debian users are unhappy with pulseaudio as a
default, it's because others have been trying to blame the user for the
problems instead of constructively engaging to *fix* pulseaudio.  All
software has bugs.  The difference is in how you handle them.

-- 
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Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
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Re: pulseaudio related problems....