ownership of devices

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to bring up something that has bothered multimedia users and
developers for a long time about Fedora - the ownership of devices.

Currently, in Fedora, permissions are set to 600.  Ownership is set to
root, until a user logs in, and then it gets owned by the user.

This has multiple problems.

a) user switching assigns ownership to the first user that managed to
log in on the machine.  A second login under a different account will
not be able to use sound or video devices

b) server programs like flumotion and icecast cannot be installed to
work as a service without manual intervention

A lot of other distributions solve this simply by creating a group for
these devices, "audio", "sound", "media", whatever.  Then normal users
get added to this group, and rpms can as part of the install add their
newly-created user to this group, and everyone is happy.

The only problem is that apparently it is hard for an rpm to add a group
when a system is being upgraded between distros; ie, while anaconda
could add this new group just fine, people doing a dist upgrade, it is
claimed, will not get this group installed.

I would like to know if anyone else sees this as a problem (I have to
explain the situation to users that want to install and run flumotion
pretty much every time someone tries it).  At this point I am very
tempted to do evil things from the flumotion rpm just so this problem
gets dealt with instead of being shuffled under the carpet :)

Comments appreciated,

Thomas


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