Better way to manage /proc/bus/usb/* ownership?

[Jason Grant]

On Sun, 2007-07-08 at 20:18 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On 7/8/07, Fryderyk Dziarmagowski <freetz at gmx.net> wrote:
> > --- Jason Grant <expires07 at logular.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On a fresh install of fedora7, gthumb reports an error "cannot claim USB
> > > device" when my camera is inserted. This is because the files
> > > under /proc/bus/usb have only root privileges.
> >
> > isn't /dev/bus/usb/* accessing a prefered way? I don't even have usbfs
> > mounted and I can access my camera over libusb without smallest
> > problems (same for scanner).
> 
> Right, recent distros use /dev/bus/usb/ nodes managed by udev.
> HAL/PolicyKit/ConsoleKit will grant/revoke access to usb devices by
> adding/removing ACL's to nodes in /dev/bus/usb. The usbfs in /proc can
> not be used, because it can't handle access control lists.
> 
> Any work in that area should improve HAL/PolicyKit/ConsoleKit
> integration. Upstream HAL can not support hacks that change the
> primary owner/group setting of device nodes. Fast-user-switching, or
> sane handling of multiple user sessions is not possible that way.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kay
> 

Thanks for the responses.

I'm an end-user that is new to HAL, and trying to understand where the
gap is in Fedora, how best to introduce a temporary fix on my PC, and
whether to report a fedora bug.

>From what I can gather here, it sounds like changing ownership of /proc
files is frought, and I should instead make sure the permissions
under /dev/bus/usb should be managed properly.  I'm still unclear -
should I be introducing a udev rule for this, or is there an ACL
mechanism in HAL that I should be using?

Thanks,

Jason.