PulseAudio

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 20:33 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le mardi 27 février 2007 à 13:20 -0500, David Zeuthen a écrit :
> 
> > So it's like this. For *modern* Linux desktop we've been moving
> > functionality from system-wide daemons into per-session daemons *simply*
> > because system-wide daemons have a number of problems. 
> 
> Per-session daemons may be nice for stuff that does not require
> exclusive access, to manage hardware they're a disaster. I don't want to
> log in at midnight so my GUI recording software is authorised to access
> the tuner card, wireless link should not go down at user logout, power
> management should happen even on a mostly headless system, etc

I already answered your question re device permissions here

 https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-February/msg00713.html

> The "modern" Linux desktop seems limited to a single-user laptop in
> brick mode when one logs out. 

Yes, having some kind of policy agent running when no user is logged in
is desirable. It has nothing to do with this discussion though.

> Per-sessions daemons are not simple
> they're dumb.

Actually these daemons have lots of features (for example nm-applet has
WPA2, VPN, secure access to user secrets) and is by far more advanced
that what we had before. 

We simply just need to run them when no user is logged in. Reason why
this hasn't happened is that, if you didn't know, answering the question
"is a user logged in?" is damn hard to do in a portable and clever way,
hence ConsoleKit. Heck, system level daemons that are pure mechanisms,
like HAL, now leverage this CK to do things like this

 http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=commit;h=d11a896c7cf1edd2d1d1e46647abdbdc53651224

Again, it has nothing to do with this discussion.

      David