PulseAudio

[xiphmont at xiph.org]

On 2/27/07, David Zeuthen <davidz at redhat.com> wrote:

> Oh please. Keep this discussion technical.

I meant exactly what I said.  It was not intended as a personal attack.

> Either we do things right or we don't do them at all. No more hacks for
> benefit in the short run. Please.
>
> > Impossibility of emulation.  Emulation is not optional.  We do not
> > make forward progress by throwing all the current users under the bus.
> >  This is *the* reason esd was a resounding failure.
>
> Users can use LD_PRELOAD for such broken apps that we can't patch to
> live in this century. We all know that /dev/dsp is fundamentally broken
> and no-one but people living stuck in the 90's are using it.

LD_PRELOAD is a fragile hack that wasn't enough to save ESD.  Either
we do things right or we don't do them at all. No more hacks for
benefit in the short run. Please.

> > No, it does not.
>
> Heck, so uid 501 can poke the streams created by uid 500? That's a show
> stopper just because of security implications. Do you disagree?

I agree it's not acceptible in the mid/long term.  However, this is
already what Ubuntu and Debian do today.

> That's only because PA decides to open the device directly and haven't
> been taught to give it up on session inactivity. That's not hard to
> change and it's the right thing to do *anyway* since we probably want a
> default policy where audio is muted from inactive sessions just like
> video is muted.

And that's no different than if pulse was a system daemon that listened to dbus.

> Heck, we're getting revoke() soon (see #230006) so whether the PA
> instance in a session likes it or not it's going to have access to the
> sound device revoked. It just needs to cope with that *just like* it
> needs to cope with devices being hot-removed.

revoke is just such a .... stunningly... idiotic idea....

> Well, there's no politics here apart from wishing not to introduce
> short-term hacks that will haunt us for ever.

I can't take you seriously when you keep saying that, then pushing LD_PRELOAD.

> What is the view of all this from PA upstream? I talked a lot to Lennart
> at LCA about this and he said system-wide pulse was a non-starter
> exactly for the reasons I listed.

That's partially because I convinced him so at GUADEC.  It took some arguing.

Monty