how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

[Les Mikesell]

Lennart Poettering wrote:

> Footnotes:
> 
> [1] And I certainly don't want other people using my machine to spy on
>     my VoIP calls or listen into the audio track of my very private
>     porn videos! ;-)

But sometimes you do want simultaneous multiplexed access or random use 
among a set of users/processes not separated by any particular event. 
It should be the administrator/users decision about who can do what, not 
hard coded in a program.  Controlling access among multiple users on a 
multi user operating system isn't exactly a new concept except for the 
recent notion that logging in at the console (if you happen to have such 
a thing) should magically give you ownship of more than /dev/tty. Why 
can't you provide an init.d script to be used (optionally) to start a 
daemon associated with a local sound device if you need it to handle 
processes not associated with a login (perhaps mythtv or any of the 
jukebox server process), add a group that will always be permitted 
access so certain users/processes can be given permanent access 
regardless of any events, and use kernel locking if you want to 
guarantee exclusive access?  That makes it the usual 'service 
service_name start/stop' and 'chkconfig service_name on' operations that 
fedora/RH users expect to use to control optional daemons.  If sessions 
that proxy to remote devices run separate daemons, those could still be 
started on demand, and if you don't need the init.d daemon, you wouldn't 
have to use it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com