how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

Nalin Dahyabhai nalin at redhat.com
Wed Dec 19 16:16:41 UTC 2007


On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 09:28:22AM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 15:22 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > Anyway why not do a pam module such that all the login systems (be it
> > wdm, xdm, console login...) can benefit from it? We have a wondefully
> > modular system for everything that can take place on login, this would
> > ease life for a lot of people, and allow for choice of UI instead of
> > tying those who don't have the money to pay programmers to UI they don't
> > like.
> 
> Don't let Nalin hear that...

I recommend against using PAM as a place to be launching arbitrary
processes.  The environment in which a module runs is just way too
underspecified to be dependable for doing that.

Environment, privilege level, signal handling, none of it's guaranteed
by the specification [1].  If you fork a process (from a module, which
is loaded by a shared library, with the calling application having no
idea of what to expect), you have to be _very_ careful about how you do
it, and how you handle its termination, and how all of that interacts
with what the calling appliction's already doing.

Even for the modules which are careful about this, we still run into
bugs.  And many modules aren't careful.

Sure, maybe we need something that'll serve the function of launching
random stuff for you when you log in, but I don't think that PAM is it.

HTH,

Nalin

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/tech/rfc/mirror-rfc/rfc86.0.txt




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