Ran the direct-link spike on the live graph (PipeWire 1.6.8,
WirePlumber 0.5.15). Fan-out carries full-level audio for paplay, mpv
and VLC while the application keeps its existing speaker link;
WirePlumber does not reap foreign links across default-sink switch,
suspend/resume or 100s steady state; and non-lingering links are
destroyed automatically when their owning connection is SIGKILLed.
The decisive result is that destroying the capture sink mid-share left
the application playing to its speakers undisturbed, so capture-side
failure degrades to "not captured" rather than breaking the user's
audio. That is the property the move-based design had to work hard to
approximate.
Records what the spike does not prove: fidelity beyond signal presence,
daemon restart, quantum perturbation, and exclusive/passthrough streams.
The capture null sink is still pactl-owned, so Stop Share continues to
leak a module every time and the graceful-stop work is still owed.
Eligibility becomes a broad guarded selector rather than a narrow
allowlist, since copying no longer risks disturbing the source.
Option A and its attendant cleanup, restore and output-switch machinery
are retained for the record but are no longer the plan. A v3 rewrite is
owed once the AEC playback-leg identity is settled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
molluskandClaude Opus 4.8
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