Heads up for login managers

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2007-02-25 at 09:56 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Think system with PVR card & video output on TV/videoprojector/whatever
> You will want a continuously running background session managing the
> video bits (recording stuff, outputing video, reacting to lirc remote
> commands) with normal computer user sessions running in parallel on the
> computer screen head

For such things, you can simply drop a file (requires root access)
somewhere such that the users/groups of your choice can get access. See
both 

 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=140853
 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229912

for examples where this is discussed (Flumotion resp. accessible gdm). I
hope you agree that, as a long term goal, we shouldn't allow users in
inactive sessions to capture A/V such as to spy on active sessions :-).
But, sure, that is policy and when you do policy you better provide a
way to override it. So there you go.

(Btw, ideally, PVR functionality would be provided in such a way that
these things just runs in the background and you wouldn't need a
dedicated login session. But if you want, it's not difficult to change
although as mentioned in 140853 I need to write some good docs about.)

(Of course, right now in Rawhide we don't remove the ACL's on session
inactivity (it's a one-line change though) but that's mostly because we
don't have revoke()....)

      David