Creating a jackuser group

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 06:56 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> Hmm; I wonder if there are better ways to do this.  Debian/Ubuntu use
> groups for networking stuff, and, for example, you can't talk to
> NetworkManager unless you're in the 'netdev' group.  Which is odd.
> 
> So lets think about the user experience here.  If somebody installs an
> app that uses Jack or requires realtime audio capabilities, what's the
> failure mode if they're not in the 'rtaudio' group?  How would they know
> what to do to be able to do realtime audio?  How do they get told that
> they need to got to system-config-users, enter the root password, and
> add themselves?
> 
> Just fixing up the lower layers and base permission scheme doesn't fix
> the problem; we've got to think how it works vertically all down the
> entire stack.  About the last thing we want is a nice "Could not
> initialize realtime audio" dialog in some app, which is par for the
> course, but says _nothing_ about what failed, and how to fix it.

Probably the right thing is to allow the process to run as realtime if,
and only if, the user is logged into the local console. So I'd rather
people try to figure out how to do that instead of papering over it with
group membership and harassing the user with pointless questions.
Thanks.

     David