The following observations were made on a setup (Arch Linux, x86_64, recently
synched, Arch pulseaudio package 7.0-2) on which the user desires that no
automated launch or respawning of the PA daemon should occur; the user
wishes to start the PA daemon only manually, without any behind the scenes
"assistance".
The user's client.conf contains only the following lines:
default-server =
autospawn = no
First, verify via ps that no PA process is running. Then, from the commandline
as the (non-root) user:
$ export PULSE_LOG=99
$ pulseaudio -v -v -v -v -v --start
D: [pulseaudio] caps.c: Cleaning up privileges.
D: [pulseaudio] conf-parser.c: Parsing configuration file \
'/etc/pulse/daemon.conf'
D: [pulseaudio] conf-parser.c: Parsing configuration file \
'/home/XXX/.config/pulse/client.conf'
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
Upon return to the shell prompt, interrogate the exit status:
$ echo $?
1
Now observe via ps that a PA daemon process is running:
... S<sl 16:19 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
and appears to be behaving normally in all respects.
At least three things in the above are worthy of head-scratching:
1. The error message states "daemon startup failed", yet a pulseaudio
process clearly did start, and appears to be running as a daemon process.
2. The '--daemonize=no' shown on the ps line seems wrong, since the PA
process -- which was reported as having failed to start -- is in fact
running as a daemon process.
3. The exit status from the startup command is nonzero (failure), yet the
daemon was evidently started successfully.
