how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 19.12.07 15:22, Patrice Dumas (pertusus at free.fr) wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 12:07:44PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > 
> > The f-u-s code is open. You're welcome to hack up your one UI for
> > it. That's what Free Software is all about: scracthing your own
> > itches. We already supply you with a couple of UIs, if they are not
> > good enough for you, then I guess you need to get your hands dirty
> > yourself and teach us fools how a really good UI should look
> > like.
> 
> We don't have necessarily time to do such things. Many people in fedora
> are benevolent. 

I am very benevolent, too. ;-)

> 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.

PAM is about authentication. It's just not the place to start
daemons. I mean, why should we start it there? We don't start dbus from
there either, or X11, or nm-applet, or gnome-volume-manager or
seahorse-agent or gnome-screensaver or vino-server or anything else
that runs in the usual login session.

And why don't we start those things from PAM? Because we already start
them from the session manager, in the appropriate order. Because
starting and monitoring processes is just what a session manager is
good in. A session manager is not good for authenticating users, and
PAM is not great for starting/monitoring/stopping processes. So we
leave PAM the authentication and session preparation stuff, and leave
session management to the session manager. 

Also, PAM is system configuration. If we'd start PA from there, then
the user would have no way to disable PA unless he's root. And, as it
seems, some people are very eager to do just that. ;-)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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