Musescore mistakenly suspends pulseaudio because of missing gawk

[Rob van den Berg]

[Páll confirmed musescore, and added pulseaudio and "confirmed" that (99% sure). Not sure if "PulseAudio" (upstream), I added, should included/needed/confirmed or/and "pulseaudio (Ubuntu)" only.]

From http://musescore.org/en/node/22727
"By default Ubuntu has mawk installed instead of gawk and so Musescore suspends pulseaudio when it does not need to.
A temporary fix is to install gawk, however this should work out of the box."

I've created a symlink to mawk and this seems to work, pulseaudio is not suspended anymore

[Páll Haraldsson (pall-haraldsson)]

This failure is in Ubuntu 14.04 (and Xubuntu, I took that out from main bug description).

I also have 13.10 that didn't have gawk (only mawk) installed. When installing musescore gawk got installed. Why would that not happen in 14.04? I guess there is a dependency missing but why all of a sudden? Should it be added or mawk be used? And why is there not a symlink then from "gawk" to (m)awk? And isn't that a more general but not just affecting musescore?

And why should this disable sound in other programs - possibly (I'm not sure my second hand info is correct):

http://musescore.org/node/22313

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Páll Haraldsson (pall-haraldsson)]

What I confirmed myself is I did not get a sound from this program and "the "time" does not advance on the player". After closing the program sound was ok in other programs. I didn't try at the same time, but my brother says all sound was gone. He thought this program had broken all sound in the system (but would probably be ok if he had just closed the program).

I'm not sure how I escalate, it looks bad (for LTS), say critical (non-security) bug, somehow?

[Páll Haraldsson (pall-haraldsson)]

Assuming pulsuaudio gets disabled by musescore (I assume when you try to start playing, not when installing). That is assuming similiar to in link in comment #1.

pulseaudio or audio in general is a core component of Ubuntu and shouldn't the bug be marked Critical (or at least Important)? Can anyone do that?

[Páll Haraldsson (pall-haraldsson)]

I meant to add pulseaudio. Not replace musescore. Musescore is the "cause", and could be "fixed" there with a dependency (or something)? However if I have to choose musescore or pulseaudio I would choose pulseaudio or whatever is appropriate in Ubuntu regarding audio (and to get the attention of core people) as it seems to be a systemic issue not *just* an application bug.

[Páll Haraldsson (pall-haraldsson)]

I confirmed the bug for musescore, not 100% sure pulseaudio is the problem, just trusting "suspends pulseaudio" from bug-title and seems similar to link I provided in #1.

[Toby Smithe (tsmithe)]

Pàll, please calm down, and read [1] for information on bug importance levels. At most this is of 'Medium' importance, but most likely, given that there is a very simple work-around, this is of 'Low' importance. It would also be appreciated if you stop modifying the report, since we are aware that it exists, and every change just sends more e-mails. This bug is also clearly not in PulseAudio, but in MuseScore's handling of it. Previously, MuseScore used gawk to detect PulseAudio, but the dependency was later changed to mawk (as that was better suited to Debian). This check is now obsolete, and so new upload of MuseScore is in progress to remove it.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Bug%20importances

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package musescore - 1.3+dfsg-2

---------------
musescore (1.3+dfsg-2) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Remove obsolete mscore.sh script
    (Closes: #714269, #714272, #719615, #737765, #743970;
     LP: #1284273, #880492)
  * Replace 'Conflicts' with 'Breaks' (LP: #1086344)

 -- Toby Smithe <email address hidden> Mon, 12 May 2014 16:34:50 +0100