[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulse audio and NFS home directories.

[Nix]

On 13 Jun 2009, Lennart Poettering outgrape:
> On Sat, 13.06.09 16:46, Nix (nix at esperi.org.uk) wrote:
>> Personally, if something went wrong with PA I would never think of
>> looking in ~/.config/, because the directory is plainly superfluous:
>> dotfiles in $HOME *are* configuration, so there's no need for an extra
>> layer of directories. As there's no way everything will ever switch to
>> using ~/.config, all this does is adds an inconsistent place to keep
>> config files: and Unix has been fairly free of such inconsistencies
>> until now.
[...]
> Gah. If you ask me Unix is a complex system with many misdesigns and
> limitations. It might be a bit less bad then many other systems, but
> seriously, abstractions like the unix mantra of "everything is a file"
> are just plain broken. My sound card is simply not a file, and people
> who think that are smoking too much weird stuff.

Agreed, a sound card is not a file: but the OS should endeavour to layer
an abstraction over the *interfaces* to the sound card *such that it
can be accessed via a file descriptor*.

And PA does that: it has a network protocol that you can talk to it over.
Congratulations, PA makes your sound card a file :)

> Ther are some good ideas in Unix, but believing it was the holy grail
> is crack.

The 'everything is a file' part is critical, actually. I can think of
exactly two times it's been seriously violated: SysVIPC and networking.
The former was such a mess as a direct result that nobody uses it
anymore: the latter's absence of /dev files for networking devices was
less critical but still ugly.

> I'd take "non-unixlike" as a compliment, not an insult, thank you very
> much.

It depends if you replace it with something as consistent as well as
better. If what you produce doesn't get complete coverage you end up
with a mess. (Thankfully Linux audio was already a mess: you can hardly
make it *less* consistent.)

> And in case you wondered, with stuff like policykit, consolekit and
> stuff we are doing our best to make Linux less and less
> Unix-like.

I dunno. Most of those are improving the authentication systems, and
Unix's standard authentication systems have always sucked so much
that people have long tried to reinvent them (viz Kerberos).

> And yes, we absolutely should move our stuff to the XDG dirs. Patches
> welcome.

What advantages do they have? What on earth possessed anyone to think
that that extra layer of directories was a good idea? Right now it's
just a pointless inconsistency: somewhere else I have to look for
configuration. Great.