Greetings, Pulseaudio Maintenance Team and Debian Multimedia
Maintainers!
I come to you with a packaging problem, and I am hoping your two
groups may come up with a solution.
https://packages.debian.org/sid/pulseaudio-module-jack
Debian package pulseaudio-module-jack, needed for
bridging PA and JACK through module-jackdbus-detect seems
to be orphaned! QJackCtl does not include it as a dependency even
though they enable JackDBus by default. PulseAudio does not
include it in its package even though default.pa loads
module-jackdbus-detect if module-jackdbus-detect.so exists.
In my use case, starting JACK througoh QJackCtl without the package meant sinks and sources were not being auto-spawned. No error message came up even though the .so file was missing. The only indication was the lack of sinks and sources, and non-functioning audio. After a long day of troubleshooting, I discovered the following PulseAudio error in journalctl:
$ journalctl --user --unit=pulseaudio.service | grep "module-jackdbus-detect"
Apr 25 05:53:30 super pulseaudio[9936]: Failed to open module module-jackdbus-detect.so: \ module-jackdbus-detect.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Eventually, through help of the people on IRC, I was able to
discover this error, and discover pulseaudio-module-jack was
missing from my computer. I installed the package via apt, and the
problem was fixed.
This poses a problem, because a casual end-user such as myself would never have guessed why things were broken! There was no error in QJackCtl, and the PulseAudio Error was hidden in a SystemD's journal.
To solve this, it was my initial thought that QJackCtl should include this package, but it was the opinion of the folk in Freenode #lad (Linux Audio Developers) that PulseAudio package maintainers should have no reason not to include it with pulseaudio because it is needed by ALL third-party apps that enable jackdbus.
Either way, everyone pointed their fingers toward your two groups to pose my inquiry.
So, what do either of you think? Should QJackCtl include pulseaudio-module-jack as a dependency? Or should PulseAudio just include the package by default to avoid any third-party omissions in the future?
Cheers!
Kraus