[pulseaudio-discuss] system-wide daemon

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 10/02/10 06:51 did gyre and gimble:
> Also imagine TV tuners, webcams are basically handled the same way.
> One user might want to capture a TV movie, while the other one doesn't
> need access to it.

The user may want to do that but it doesn't mean that they should.

I mean seriously, how many users really want to do this? We're talking
about network use here - multiseat stuff and user switching works fine
so we're specifically saying that someone wants to SSH in and take
control of the webcam.

For tv tuners there is typically a middleware involed - e.g. mythbackend
or vdr etc. so doesn't really apply.

> The ck assignment would not be valid for this.

I disagree.

> Now imagine we have a DVB device, multiple users can access the same TV channel.
> While another user might stream or capture the TV content the user
> sitting behind the PC might watch
> the current tuned in TV channel. This is a not so unlikely scenario
> with our devices.

So use mythbackend + mythfrontend or vdr+vdr-receiver or whatever ti's
called.

> This is also just another example where the MS-DOS like single user
> scenario does not fit.

Dude, WTF? Seriously, stop spouting rubbish. My whole comment here has
been about multi-user setups and controlled handover of permissions
between users when appropriate. This is a million miles away form a
"single user scenario". The fact we don't agree that the system should
be open up to abuse from any user who happens to have access does not
make this anything like MS-DOS. If you want to be taken seriously in a
discussion, keep your points valid and on topic.




Here is a (horrible) suggestion. How about this:
 1. Implement a Request Permission call in console-kit.
 2. When an SSH user logs in, and tried to access a device, they can
fire of the "Request Permission" API in CK.
 3. A ck-agent-gui running as the active user fires up a dialog asking.
"User Bob is asking for permission to use <Insert H/W here>. This will
mean you no longer have access to this device until Bob is done with it.
Do you want to let him have it?"

That way the user who has the right to use the device can gracefully
hand over that right to another user. Personally I think this is
horrible, intrusive and fairly ugly and would be a whole framework
designed to cater for a very niche use case and thus would ultimately be
buggy and likely contain security holes.


Col



-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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