Tried Pulse Audio Again--No Good For A11y

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 23.09.08 15:25, Les Mikesell (lesmikesell at gmail.com) wrote:

>>> No, it sucks just as much when itunes does it.  You expect that kind of 
>>> stuff from Apple who only has a short history of multi-user machines and 
>>> who would really rather sell you an apple tv or ipod with dock that you 
>>> can dedicate to driving your speakers, though. Linux has always been 
>>> multi-user and doesn't have any such excuses for arbitrarily 
>>> disconnecting
>>> devices.
>> "arbitrarily"?
>
> Arbitrarily, as in guessing who should have exclusive access based on 
> nothing that particularly relates to the specific audio device.  It is no 
> more right than automatically killing scheduled tape backups would be 
> because someone else logged in on a keyboard near the tape device.

We generally consider speakers/mikes/headphones to be part of the
workplace of the user, i.e. together with mouse/keyboard/screen
we switch them over when the active session changes. 

And again, that's the way *I* think it makes the most sense. 

Of course, you are free to consider audio to be hw that is completely
detached from sessions. I disagree. Most of the RH engineers I talked
to about this agree with how *I* see things. (And Apple too, ...)

Nonetheless, I do see some sense in the way you want to use the audio
devices. However, I don't think that would be the normal use-case, and I also
don't think that defaulting to this insecure configuration would be a
good choice.

So, let's end this discussion right now. I did acknowledge the
validity of your usecase, although I priorize a different
one. Supporting your preferred way of doing session switching for
audio is on my TODO list (although way at the end). That's the most
you will get from me. If you disagrees with my priorities, then bad
luck, you won't be able to change them.

BTW, Free Software is about scratching your own itches. Apparently
this functionality is very important to you, otherwise we wouldn't
have this discussion again and again and again. Hence: I AM HAPPY TO
MERGE YOUR PATCHES (if they are good)!

>> Oh man. Claiming that things are right because Linux always did it
>> this way is not very convincing.
>
> Linux what? The kernel doesn't make arbitrary access decisions by itself, 
> does it?

Oh man, stop it. Those decisions are not arbitrary. They make
sense. (Except maybe for you)

>>> Doesn't the kernel have a mechanism for exclusive locks on devices if 
>>> someone wants to have exclusive access?  It's not all that difficult to 
>>> eavesdrop on music playing loudly anyway...
>> Access to audio devices (both OSS and ALSA) is exclusive by default 
>> anyway.
>
> Exclusive access is OK.  Killing that access based on unrelated 
> circumstances isn't.

We don't "kill" access. We suspend access until you reactivate your
session.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4