PolicyKit authentication agent changes

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at googlemail.com
Sat Feb 26 09:28:04 UTC 2011


Hi Matthias,

thanks for your quick response. I was busy, that's why I'm not so quick.

Am Mittwoch, den 23.02.2011, 20:08 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen: 
> On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 00:14 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Not sure what you mean with 'not installed'.
> gnome-session requires polkit-gnome, so it better be installed.

Thanks for the pointer, you didn't mention that in your mail. 

> Not sure what you mean by 'cannot run by itself' either. The
> authentication agent in polkit-gnome is perfectly capable of running all
> by itself. The package just doesn't inject itself in random desktop
> environments anymore by installing an autostart file.

It cannot run because it is not started. It is not about random desktops
but about a defined list of desktops. We need all maintainers of a DE
work together on this list, therefor I made my proposal one year ago.

> I don't mind if you add a provides to your polkit agent implementation
> that wms can depend on. 

There is nothing to add, the virtual provides
"PolicyKit-authentication-agent" is already in place for all packages.

> Thats between you and the window managers... but
> as far as gnome is concerned, we don't want to depend on anything
> virtual, but control which agent is running.

I can understand this very well, but I never said the DE should depend
on the virtual provides, the applications should. A DE should depend on
the agent of the desktop, the apps should depend on a generic agent and
use the virtual provides.

Imagine you install gnome-packagekit in Xfce: It will pull in say
polkit-gnome but still not work.

Summing it all up: I still don't see the benefit of the new packaging.
polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 doesn't start on any 'random'
desktop. Indeed this is a step in the right direction and I appreciate
it because I'm on the receiving side of bugs [1].

But wether or not polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 starts on any
'random' desktop has nothing to do with your new packaging but with the
fact that you have switched from "NotShoIn" to "OnlyShowIn". The exactly
same effect could be achieved without changing the packaging, so there
is no benefit, but on the other hand it breaks many DEs / WMs that you
might not care about.

Regards,
Christoph


[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657006



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