how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 18.12.07 23:14, Simo Sorce (ssorce at redhat.com) wrote:

> > Again, this isn't PA necessarily, it's ConsoleKit / PolicyKit.  If you
> > define policy that lets everybody write to the devices then...
> 
> Sure I can do that for myself but that's not the point.
> 
> I was specifically asking if there will be a configuration option
> somewhere to handle this (I think common enough) case so that you can
> decide whether fast switching users means killing audio or not.
> 
> It seem to me that this PA thing has the noble goal of making audio
> easier to work with on a Desktop, and then you expect people to fiddle
> manually with ConsoleKit/PolicyKit to make a trivial configuration
> change for a common case?

The scenario you came up here with is totally artificial. Why? Because
right now whith dmix you cannot share audio devices like this
either. Because dmix is not open for other user ids. (And it would
not make sense to open it by default, because it comes with security
implications).

So, in fact, not much has changed by the introduction of PA: sharing
an audio device between multiple users didn't work before PA without
major reconfiguration of ALSA, and it doesn work after the
introduction of PA without some manual configuration.

As mentioned already: I do plan to add some support for sharing audio
devices like this, but it's not a top priority on my list. Far from
that. 

The right behaviour is to make sure inactive sessions cannot interfere
with your IO devices while they are inactive. And IO devices are
keyboards, mice, screens *and* sound cards.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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