pulseaudio causing crashing of applications

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 12:59:54PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> I missed this part in my other response.  X has historically _not_ been 
> a layer that dictates any policy at all.  Is it really true now that a 
> policy decision in X forces the rest of the system to break access to 
> audio devices?  That's even more shocking than someone thinking this is 
> a good idea in the first place.

Sorry I don't follow you at all at this point

- The kernel implements VT switch locking so you can decide not to switch
  desktop to another user
- X uses this to implement its own VT locking policies for the X server and
  clients. It's up to X to expose this to X clients.


On the desktop we treat a change of logged in user (as a main login not su)
as a change of control of the console. That is consistent with thirty plus
years of history, with the behaviour of other systems and with security.

Failure to do so leads to all sorts of nasties including users bugging each
other in universities, gags like the old SunOS cronjob containing an eject
command to be run every 5 minutes and worse.

But its set by policy files so if you want other users to broadcast your
webcam over the internet all day, listen to all your calls and send them to
friends you can configure it that way, but that should not be the default.

Alan