Hi. I'm the project leader for Ubuntu Studio and a prospective Debian developer. My work tends to focus mostly on multimedia production related topics, and specifically audio production.
My main objective right now is just to try making audio production easier for regular users, and this is still a big problem on most Linux based distributions. Some of this relates to the usage of audio group. First off, is there a clear policy on the use of audio group in Debian? I did find some explanations on the usage of it on this page, under 'Should users be in the "audio" group?' http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/PerfectSetup/, and from what I can determine, Debian would then fall under category 2 as explained in the text. Is that what Debian wants? I know that many distros do not use the audio group as default for users. I suspect for reasons as explained on this page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/TheAudioGroup. Audio group is also used by the jack audio server for granting realtime scheduling privilege to users. Packages jackd1 and jackd2 install a pam setting file which grants "rtprio" and "memlock" privilege to audio group. Package libffado2 installs a udev rules file granting audio group privilege to a set of firewire audio cards (which are primarily used with jack). This is quite a nice setup, since users are already in audio group and need only install jack in order to get the benefit of realtime scheduling. - This is however not a universal, standardized approach, since not all distros want the users to be in audio group. Usage of pam for granting realtime privilege *is* a standard approach though. It is what all audio production tuned distros do, and it is what people manually do on distros that doesn't provide it OOTB. The main difference is the group name used (in Ubuntu Studio, we also use the audio group - mainly because the Debian packages we import expect it). So, I would propose to use a new group, specifically for jack (and ffado). Why? If Debian adds such a group, and the Debian packages for jack and ffado make use of it, making ease of installation of Debian derived distros will greatly simplify and it would be more likely those distros would be willing to also add that group as a default group for users. At least, there would be no conflict, as is the case with audio group. And by that point, things actually do greatly simplify for regular users. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/1414358356.2467889.183498341.324fe...@webmail.messagingengine.com
