Hi,
The attached patch extends the alsa pulse plugin set with a alsa configuration hook. Allowing one to specify some configuration parameters that only come into effect when pulseaudio is running.
For example a configution file like:
@hooks [ { func on_pulse_is_running pcm.!default { type pulse } ctl.!default { type pulse } } ]
will redirect the default alsa pcm and ctl to pulse iff pulse is running. (Assuming you defined the hook function correctly ofcourse)
This is usefull for distributions that don't want to force their users to switch completely to pulseaudio, but have things a bit more dynamic :)
The solutions isn't optimal though. It will mean that every program loading accessing alsa will try to make an (extra) connection to pulse to decide what to do. But i think it's the best we can do for now (or at least that i can do with my minimal knowledge of alsa).
A nicer solution would be a way to always specify the pulse plugin as default and have a sort of fallback for when that fails.
Comments on the patch appreciated :)
Sjoerd PS: I'm not on alsa-devel, so please keep me in the CC