[pulseaudio-discuss] temporary vs persistent state data

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 14.06.07 13:07, Damon Harper (dl+pulseaudio-discuss at usrbin.ca) wrote:

Hi!

> 
> i've just installed and set up pulseaudio and i am more than impressed
> by it - bravo!  it is an elegant system and a much-needed one for the
> unix world, i think.

Thank you.

> 
> i'm a bit of a weird masochist who rolls his own distro and packaging
> system for a four-computer network, and i have noticed one problem
> with the way pulse works when it is set up as a system-wide daemon -
> it stores both temporary and persistent data in the same place
> (/var/run/pulse by default).
> 
> for instance, the gconf data and volume-restore.table file *should*, i
> presume, be maintained across reboots.  on my system, i use /var/run
> strictly for temporary data like pid files and sockets and it is wiped
> out at each reboot - so the persistent pulse data disappears.
> normally persistent data should go under /var/lib or /var/state.

Hmm, you're probably right with this interpretation of the FHS. Could
you please file a bug, so that I don't forget to fis this?

> on the other hand, pulse's pid files and sockets *should* be treated
> as temporary data and could be fair game to be wiped out if they
> remain when pulse is no longer running.
> 
> i was initially going to set up a system of symlinks to take care of
> this, but then i started looking at the pulse source.  my general idea
> would be to split the PA_SYSTEM_RUNTIME_PATH up into two components,
> one for temporary (/var/run/pulse) and one for persistent
> (/var/lib/pulse or /var/state/pulse) files.  then each component that
> needs to store files can choose the appropriate path.
> 
> complications:
> 
> - could affect existing programs?  but i don't think so, as most would
> reference pid files and sockets which remain in /var/run/pulse.

Shouldn't hurt to much, since noone should be accessing these files
without going through libpulse.

> - how does this interact with the per-user daemon operation?

When the daemon is running per user the data is split up cleanly
anway. Data that should be save is stored in ~/.pulse and dynamic data
is stored in /tmp somewhre.

> 
> - ideally, gconf lock files would go with the temporary data and gconf
> data with the permanent, though i don't know enough about gconf to> know if this is easy or even plausible.

Humm. I doubt that gconf can do that.

> any thoughts?  is this feasible / wanted / worth putting some effort
> into?  are there complications i haven't considered?

Makes a lot of sense. Please file a bug and I will eventually fix
this. (Though this is actually low-priority for me, I must admit)

Thank you for reporting this!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4