On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 6:12 AM, Tanu Kaskinen <tanu.kaskinen at linux.intel.com> wrote: > On Thu, 2014-08-21 at 16:55 -0600, Glenn Golden wrote: >> A side issue that I came across, related to the --check option, but not the >> doc issue itself: >> >> Suppose the root user wishes to use the --check option to see if user xyz >> has a PA daemon running. He does this: >> >> # XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1234 pulseaudio --check -v >> >> which dutifully reports (correctly) that "Daemon running as PID xxx". But >> it also has the silent side effect that the directory /run/user/1234/pulse is >> chowned to root.root, thus preventing user xyz from further communication >> with the daemon due to accesss permission violation. >> >> Two questions: >> >> * Can you reproduce this? >> * What is your view as to whether this is a bug? (IMO it is, and was going >> to report it, but wanted to hear your view.) > > It's not a bug, because --check isn't documented to be a tool for > checking if other users' daemons are running. If such functionality is > useful for people, then maybe we should extend the scope of --check, but > setting XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to point to another user's directory seems like > a hack to me, because it's against the usual semantics of the variable. > If there is some API for querying the runtime directory of arbitrary > users, we could implement this e.g. by adding --check-for-user=foo, but > I'm not aware of such API. In my opinion, such system API is necessary > before we should officially support this use case for --check. > > I'm not against making this an undocumented feature, though, if it turns > out that there's no good reason to chown the runtime directory when > running --check. If the user's intention is to check the status of > another user's pulseaudio, then the chowning is of course unnecessary > and harmful, but if the user's intention is to check whether his/her own > pulseaudio is running, then it's perhaps a different situation. We need > to understand why the runtime directory is ever chowned. I don't see > very good reasons for that myself, but on the other hand, I'm hesitant > to change that without understanding the original motivation. Note that the directory is chowned if pacmd or pactl are called as root with the "wrong" runtime dir. While I have no opinion on the merits of allowing --check to work as root, I think that calling `pacmd list-sinks` as root should not break the user's pulseaudio. -- Saludos, Felipe Sateler
