hi there! i've just installed and set up pulseaudio and i am more than impressed by it - bravo! it is an elegant system and a much-needed one for the unix world, i think. i'm a bit of a weird masochist who rolls his own distro and packaging system for a four-computer network, and i have noticed one problem with the way pulse works when it is set up as a system-wide daemon - it stores both temporary and persistent data in the same place (/var/run/pulse by default). for instance, the gconf data and volume-restore.table file *should*, i presume, be maintained across reboots. on my system, i use /var/run strictly for temporary data like pid files and sockets and it is wiped out at each reboot - so the persistent pulse data disappears. normally persistent data should go under /var/lib or /var/state. on the other hand, pulse's pid files and sockets *should* be treated as temporary data and could be fair game to be wiped out if they remain when pulse is no longer running. i was initially going to set up a system of symlinks to take care of this, but then i started looking at the pulse source. my general idea would be to split the PA_SYSTEM_RUNTIME_PATH up into two components, one for temporary (/var/run/pulse) and one for persistent (/var/lib/pulse or /var/state/pulse) files. then each component that needs to store files can choose the appropriate path. complications: - could affect existing programs? but i don't think so, as most would reference pid files and sockets which remain in /var/run/pulse. - how does this interact with the per-user daemon operation? - ideally, gconf lock files would go with the temporary data and gconf data with the permanent, though i don't know enough about gconf to know if this is easy or even plausible. any thoughts? is this feasible / wanted / worth putting some effort into? are there complications i haven't considered? -damon
