[Ardour-Dev] ardour sessions and write permissions

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 1:49 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano
<nando at ccrma.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Why does ardour need write permissions to the session if I just want to
> play something (no editing, nothing) and I'm not the owner? Is this
> something fixable?
>
> For example: I set up a session of a multichannel file for students to
> play but nobody can play it. But they all have perfectly fine read
> access to everything involved...

Open a session read-only implies never ever saving any changes to the
session. Changes to the session do not just include editing. They
include, for example, window positions and visibility, font sizing and
several other GUI-related settings that the person might quite
legitimately want to modify. Imagine, for example, that they are
working on a very small screen or a very large multi-monitor set up.
the problem is that several of these settings really *are* session
specific, and so even if we moved all of them into a file in
~/.ardour2 (which is true for some of this sort of stuff already), its
not true for all of them.

so, although it would certainly be a good thing for ardour to be able
to do this, its not really quite as simple as i think you are
imagining. that doesn't mean that its super-hard, either.

--p