Re: What is the policy on audio group? and, proposal of a new group for the jack audio server

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On 10/11/14 02:59, Christian Hofstaedtler wrote:
> I vaguely remember PolicyKit being involved in the daemon situation,
> when mpd tries to talk to a pulseaudio server which magically gets
> spawned

PolicyKit is typically (only?) used when a less-privileged process,
typically a user interface, communicates with a more-privileged service.
It's possible that something PK-related is going on, but I can't
immediately see any reason why either mpd or PulseAudio would want to
interact with it: both normally run with an ordinary user's privileges.

The typical scenario is:

* I tell NetworkManager to connect to a wireless network
  (or tell some other privileged service to do some other action)

* NetworkManager (or other privileged service) asks PolicyKit "is it OK
  to let smcv do this?"

* PolicyKit consults its sysadmin-, distro- or upstream-supplied
  policies, checks the facts relevant to those policies (I am in
  some groups, I am actively logged-in locally), optionally asks me
  for my password to confirm that I am actually present, and replies
  "yes" or "no"

Regards,
    S