pulseaudio-module-x11-0.9.7-0.16.svn20071017.fc8 1. Launch gnome-session-properties 2. In the Startup programs tab, "PulseAudio Session Management" has the comment "Load module-x11-xsmp into PulseAudio". Why isn't this done in the esd startup script instead?
Because of a deadlock between PA which is started as "esd", and gnome-session which is starting it. It's like this: gnome-session acts as XSM session manager. When it starts up, it registers itself as such, and then starts "esd" (which is just a wrapper script calling PA with appropriate parameters), synchronously waiting for its full startup. Now, if module-x11-xsmp is being loaded during PA's startup, we get a deadlock because PA contacts the XSM session manager, which is gnome-session which is however waiting for PA to startup and doesn't handle requests while doing that. And we freeze at login. To work around this PA starts up without XSMP support. And then, later, after "esd"'s startup is complete and gnome-session handles XDG autostart we load XSM support into the already running PA daemon. I am not sure what you are requesting wit this bug report? A more elaborate explanation in the XDG .desktop for for autostart? I'd say that would be too elaborate for a .desktop file. The whole problem will hopefully go away as soon as gnome-session and PA integrate directly and more cleanly. Are you OK if I close this bug as WONTFIX?
Closing this sounds fine to me.
Reopening, as now it's gnome-settings-daemon that starts PA, and not gnome-session, so the module could be loaded automatically on startup. (FYI, the original bug report was about a better description for the .desktop file).
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
We now start PA from a normal XDG autostart desktop file. The xsmp specific desktop file is not longer used. This bug report hence no longer applies (all in rawhide).