Pulseaudio disabling auto-mute mode

Package: pulseaudio at Debian (testing) Version: 15.0+dfsg1-2

Recently I installed new updates, including pulseaudio:

2021-10-19 23:32:51 upgrade pulseaudio:i386 14.2-2 15.0+dfsg1-2

2021-10-19 23:47:37 status installed pulseaudio:i386 15.0+dfsg1-2

After these update(s) the internal speaker of the laptop is not going automatically to mute, if the headphone is plugged in.

My laptop is a simple DELL D620, without any additional audiocard.

If I enable auto-mute, the internal speaker is going to mute, as wished.

As soon as I remove the headphone-plug, auto-mute is immediately disabled at alsamixer.

If I plug-in the headphone again, the internal speaker is not going to mute.

File /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output-speaker.conf contains the next extra lines, if I compare with version 14.2.2 :

; Make sure the internal speakers are not auto-muted once the system has speakers [Element Auto-Mute Mode] enumeration = select

[Option Auto-Mute Mode:Disabled] name = analog-output-speaker

If I comment out these lines, auto-mute is not disabled anymore by pulseaudio, and Auto-Mute works as designed.

Probably this "fix" is coming from !433 (19e34d8d).

This is a bad "fix". It completely destroys the basic functionality of Auto-Mute for every computer, to solve a problem for some specific computer. And also for this specific computer Auto-Mute will not work anymore.

I do not understand the description of the problem. It looks like without the fix the owners of the problem-computer could simply once disable Auto-Mute with the alsamixer, to solve their problem. Or it should be solved by alsa.

With the fix the owners of all other computers have to use alsamixer every time they plug in the headphone to enable Auto Mute again. Or they must try to make their own copies of pulse-audio config files to get the desired functionality. This is not wishfull and it is not easy to understand the logic of the config files. Auto-mute is a must at video-conferencing and shared office!!

In Linux Auto-Mute worked perfect when headphone was plugged in, also Auto-Mute at smartphone with Android works and even Windows-10 supports Auto-Mute.

I reported this bug some weeks ago also at Debian (testing): https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=998368 .

Recently i got an upgrade to pipewire with pipewire-pulse and wireplumber. It uses a copy of the same pulseaudio config files and has the same problem!

Kernel: Linux 5.14.0-2-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU threads) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en