[pulseaudio-discuss] New build dependency libcap-dev ?

[Ryan Lortie]

hi,

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014, at 11:03, David Henningsson wrote:
> While building PulseAudio git on Ubuntu 12.04, I noticed that I had to
> install the libcap-dev package, to get sys/capability.h. This was not
> required before, at least not by default.
> 
> Looking at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72580 it seems
> this change is intentional. If so, we should probably release note it.

Indeed this change was intentional -- and I'm glad you got hit by this. 
This is exactly the example I was talking about in the bug when I said:

"""

We do however, modify the header check to ensure we fail if there is no
<sys/capability.h> at all and we are on a system where it could be
installed.  The logic here is that it is better to give the user the
chance to install it than it is to proceed silently with a disabled
security feature on a system where it could easily be supported.
--without-caps remains an option if the user wants to force it.

"""

Ubuntu should have been using this security feature all along but wasn't
because of the silent failure if the header was missing.  Now you know.
:)

You can still disable the feature (--without-caps) but you should
probably use it because it improves security.

Cheers