On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 06:56 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
Hmm; I wonder if there are better ways to do this. Debian/Ubuntu
use
groups for networking stuff, and, for example, you can't talk to
NetworkManager unless you're in the 'netdev' group. Which is odd.
So lets think about the user experience here. If somebody installs an
app that uses Jack or requires realtime audio capabilities, what's the
failure mode if they're not in the 'rtaudio' group? How would they know
what to do to be able to do realtime audio? How do they get told that
they need to got to system-config-users, enter the root password, and
add themselves?
Just fixing up the lower layers and base permission scheme doesn't fix
the problem; we've got to think how it works vertically all down the
entire stack. About the last thing we want is a nice "Could not
initialize realtime audio" dialog in some app, which is par for the
course, but says _nothing_ about what failed, and how to fix it.
Probably the right thing is to allow the process to run as realtime if,
and only if, the user is logged into the local console. So I'd rather
people try to figure out how to do that instead of papering over it with
group membership and harassing the user with pointless questions.
Thanks.
David