[pulseaudio-discuss] system-wide daemon

[David Henningsson]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 10.02.10 07:14, David Henningsson (launchpad.web at epost.diwic.se) wrote:
> 
>> But printers are more of a system-wide resource, and for some use cases,
>> so is the soundcard. 
> 
> This is nonsense. I am not sure how your ears are constructed, but on
> a multiseat system if you want to share a soundcard between two seats,
> where would you put the speakers so that the two users have the same
> distance from L and R and they are on the left and the right side? I
> mean, those users would have to sit on top of each other or detachable
> ears or something.

Detachable ears seems cool, although I'd prefer headphones. Anyway,
multiseat wasn't the use case I was talking about here, I was more
thinking of the "use computer as combined desktop workstation and
independent media player for the kitchen" use case.

> We discussed this with a couple of folks long time ago, and decided
> that some reasources are per-seat resources, and should be configured
> like that. Those devices are keyboards, mice, screens, sound cards,
> webcams and a couple of others. the UDEV_ACL=1 property in the udev
> tree marks most of them. This discussion was mostly done on the udev
> level btw, it is only indirectly related to PA.
> 
> Now, in some non-standard cases it might make sense to have the access
> rules deviate from this default, but those are the exceptions, not the
> common cases. And that means that you configure it that way, but the
> default will be the safe, common case, not the dangerous uncommon
> case.

Exactly.

> BTW, I really do not know why I am even responding, 

Neither do I. If I knew what makes you respond to some posts and leave
others behind, I would have used that knowledge to make you respond to
the alsa-plugins patch I suggested earlier [1].

> Do you know this Google thing? It's kinda
> cool, you should try it.

Never heard of it. I'll go search for it and see if I find something.

>> And then, sharing makes sense. If another user is
>> allowed to print a document while I'm logged in, why shouldn't he be
>> able to play a sound? So would then the solution be to run PA as a
>> system-wide daemon, and possibly assign soundcards to it via udev?
> 
> Right, allow every user to listen into all voip calls, 

You're mixing the use cases up. The soundcards you use to make voip
calls, are not necessarily the ones you want to share with other users.

> Lemme guess, you disable access control to your X11 screen too?

There are use cases for that as well, but we can leave them out for now.

// David

[1]
https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2010-February/006471.html