Do not link against PulseAudio and JSON-GLib < 0.16

this is a public announcement.

if you link against PulseAudio, whether you want it or not, you’ll get an automatic dependency on json-c, a small C library that parses JSON and doesn’t have any dependency¹. sadly, json-c leaks symbols all over the place, and one of them is called json_object_get_type².

JSON-GLib, the library that yours truly wrote about 6 years ago to parse JSON using a decent C library as a base, also has a type called json_object_get_type³.

if you link against PulseAudio and JSON-GLib⁴ then you’ll get a segmentation fault with a weird stack trace, like this one and its duplicates⁵.

the solution is to use a version of JSON-GLib greater than 0.16.1, which builds JSON-GLib with the -Bsymbolic linker flag⁶.

that would be all.

1. which is arguably a plus for a system daemon [↩]
2. which returns an integer for I don’t know which reason [↩]
3. which returns a GType for the JsonObject boxed structure, so that you can use them in properties and signal marshallers; as it happens, GType is a long lookalike [↩]
4. or any other library that depends on JSON-GLib, like Clutter [↩]
5. since both return values and arguments of the functions above are compatible, the linker won’t moan about it, so you won’t see any warning or error when building your code [↩]
6. another solution is to statically link json-c inside PulseAudio instead of dynamically linking it; another solution is to link json-c with -Bsymbolic; yet another solution would be for PA to not use a dependency to parse JSON – or drop JSON entirely because I can’t for the life of me understand why an audio server is dealing with JSON at all [↩]