Re: [PATCH] alsactl: Try to create state file directory

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Mon, 8 Jun 2015 05:52:18 -0700,
Dan Nicholson wrote:
> 
> On Jun 8, 2015 4:38 AM, "Takashi Iwai" <tiwai@suse.de> wrote:
> >
> > At Fri,  5 Jun 2015 15:00:47 -0700,
> > Dan Nicholson wrote:
> > >
> > > Try to create the directory for the state file when saving so we don't
> > > depend on it being created ahead of time. This only checks for failures
> > > on existing directories and doesn't try to create the leading
> > > directories or workaround any other errors. This should catch the common
> > > case where /var/lib exists, but /var/lib/alsa doesn't.
> >
> > I don't think it's the role of alsactl.  It saves a file on the
> > certain directory.  If it doesn't exist, it's a failure of the
> > installed package.
> 
> Sure, that's understandable, but there's a couple reasons I think this is
> helpful addition.
> 
> First, if no path is supplied, store will save to /var/lib/alsa. So, it's
> not as of the user has supplied a path it didn't setup correctly. It would
> be nice if alsactl worked out of the box without additional integration by
> packagers.

For that, a safer way would be to create /var/lib/alsa in the
installation.

> Second, my real motivation for fixing this is to support stateless type of
> systems that come with a clean /var. At Endless we're using ostree. The OS
> is composed by Debian packages, and indeed alsa-utils is setup to create
> /var/lib/alsa on install. However, to use the same OS snapshot for all
> users, the contents of /var are stripped since they represent local system
> state. We can certainly add a method for creating the directory at runtime,
> but we believe it's more robust to have the program manage its own state as
> much as possible.

Why not specifying the proper directory via alsactl -f option for
user?


Takashi