[pulseaudio-discuss] Multiple ".pulse" directories

[Jan Steffens]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Ken Mandelberg <km at mathcs.emory.edu> wrote:
> We mount the same home directory by NFS on multiple machines. Some of the
> machines may even have multiple sessions by the same user.
>
> Is there some way to tell pulseaudio to use different ~/.pulse directories
> perhaps indexed with some string contrived to be unique for the session?
>
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Seems there are three environment variables to set:

PULSE_CONFIG_PATH
Defaults to ~/.pulse, contains configuration files like client.conf,
daemon.conf and default.pa.

PULSE_STATE_PATH
Defaults to ~/.pulse, contains server state files which should be kept
across reboots.

PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH
Defaults to /tmp/pulse-${random}. If unset, also creates a link in
~/.pulse called ${machineid}-runtime.
Should not be kept across reboots.


So for your setup, PULSE_CONFIG_PATH should probably stay unset (use
~/.pulse) while PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH should be set to some unique,
secure dir in /tmp on login.

I'm not sure how to handle PULSE_STATE_PATH. Make it volatile (like
PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH) and lose state after logout? Or on login and
logout, sync it to/from NFS (somehow atomically), so the user always
loads the state of the last session that was logged out? May not even
make sense to share this between machines.