how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

[Robin Norwood]

Lennart Poettering <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> writes:

> On Tue, 18.12.07 19:23, Simo Sorce (ssorce at redhat.com) wrote:
>
>> > However, multi-seat support is not really available in CK yet.
>> > 
>> > davidz and William Jon McCann can tell you more about this.
>> 
>> Trying again, maybe you will answer my other question too.
>> 
>> My normal use case is that I have rhythmbox running in my account which
>> I tend to screenlock, when my wife wants to browse the web briefly she
>> fast-switches to her account.
>> 
>> What will PA do? Will it stop rhythmbox in the other session? If so why?
>> What is the logic? I usually want to keep the music running.
>
> It will pause playback. When you switch back it will resume. Much like
> MacOS does it.
>
> The idea is that speakers are IO devices much like the screen,
> keyboard, and mice. I do believe that the normal case is that when you
> switch sessions, you don't want to allow the inactive session to
> record data from you microphone anymore or interfere with your audio
> in otherwise.
>
> I know that some people want to continue playback when they switch to
> a different session. However, I do not believe that this should be the
> default. Maybe we will add support for this in a later version
> somehow, but I do believe the right approach is to make sure that
> inactive sessions cannot spy on the user who's active on the seat.

Especially since the controls for the music playback are in the other
session.  The use case that I run into with F7 is:

o Offspring #1 starts Battle For Wesnoth as his user.
o Offspring #2 takes over the computer, switches to his own user, and
  wants to play some other game.

For F7, the Wesnothy music keeps playing, and, to turn it off, the
computer needs to switch back to Offspring #1's account, log in, and
close his game.  Then Offspring #2 can have sound.

This sucks.  I haven't installed F8 on The Offsprings computer yet, (I
know, I know), but from what I understand, Pulseaudio should fix this
very nicely.

It would be just as bad if I were playing music.  If a song I really
hate comes up, and I don't have Offspring #1's password, there's no way
to skip it.  Terrible.  I really can't understand how anyone would want
the default behavior to be different.

When some users might want audio from one user to keep playing as logged
into another user, it sounds like they have to do some manual tweaks.
No big deal.

Keep up the great work on PA, Lennart.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching