Comment 49 for bug 1521987

I am not sure that the suggested patch is a good fix for the problem.
As I understand it, with the patch, when the currently active destination becomes unavailable, new destination is chosen on the basis of its priority.

Now consider my own use case:
I have S/PDIF and Analog outputs on the chip, but S/PDIF is not connected to anywhere (there is no connector on the box). I have speakers permanently connected to the analog "line out" socket. And I use headphones intermittently. Normally, desktop's audio widget configures "line out" as active, which is what I want. When I plug the headphones, they automatically become active, and speakers are muted, which is what I want, again. But, when I unplug the headphones, (unconnected) S/PDIF becomes active instead of the speakers, and I lose sound until I manually reconfigure the output via the audio widget.

I think that my scenario is quite typical (it happens both on my desktop and notebook computers), and should be addressed better.

Thank you.