PolicyKit authentication agent changes

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 23.02.2011, 15:55 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:
> As of version 0.100 (which will land in F15 as a post-alpha update), the
> polkit-gnome package will no longer install an autostart file for
> polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1. Instead, each desktop environment
> is reponsible for making sure that an authentication agent is running.
> 
> For GNOME, this is done by gnome-session installing an autostart file
> with OnlyShowIn=GNOME;. Other desktop environments that rely on
> polkit-gnome need to do something similar.

Adding "OnlyShowIn" is certainly a step in the right direction but I'm
afraid it will break many desktops out there, namely all window manager
such as openbox, fluxbox, icewm etc. Adding a desktop file there doesn't
make much sense as these WMs don't "rely" on an authentication agent.
It's the applications that rely on it, but we don't have control over
what software people install.

I made a different proposal last year, please refer to 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-April/134578.html

IMHO my approach has the advantage that it works for all DEs/WMs:
Install a program that needs an authentication agent, it will pull in
one of them through the virtual provides and the agent will be started
on the next time you log in.

We achieve this by making one agent the default. The default agent will
have "NotShowIn=" to exclude the DEs that have an agent of their own
while the others will have "OnlyShowIn=" to limit them to their desktop.

I don't care which one is default is as long as it has only a small
dependency footprint (kdebase-runtime for example has not). I only
suggested lypolkit because it will be chosen by yum in most situations
anyway.

Can you explain what the advantage of your approach is? From a packaging
point it looks broken: One the one hand we package a authentication
agent that cannot run by itself, on the other we package an autostart
file for something that is not necessarily installed.

Regards,
Christoph