PolicyKit authentication agent changes
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Feb 26 10:58:33 UTC 2011
Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 23.02.2011, 20:08 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:
>> 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.
Well, having the apps depend on the virtual Provides is only of limited use
because what yum picks if you're lacking an agent is not necessary the
correct agent for your desktop. The app cannot really know what agent is the
correct one, so there's no good way to put the dependency in the app. (We
can only have the app depend on "any PolicyKit authentication agent", which
is what the virtual Provides does, but this still doesn't ensure that the
correct one for your desktop is present.)
Therefore, the dependency really needs to be carried by the desktop
environment, at which point there's no point in having the apps Require
anything at all. IMHO, PolicyKit authentication should just be considered a
basic desktop service which is present in ANY GUI desktop, it's up to the
desktop environment to Require the proper agent (and up to there, I
definitely agree with Matthias). In fact, kdebase-workspace already
Requires: polkit-kde.
Once we're there, Matthias is saying that we can just as well have the
desktop also START the authentication agent. I'm not entirely sure that this
is the best approach, but at that point, this isn't really THAT important.
You have to put in a Requires for the authentication agent anyway, so at
that point you can just as well drop in an autostart file, too. (And in
fact, don't some of the desktops/WMs you have in mind require their own non-
XDG autostart setup anyway?)
> Imagine you install gnome-packagekit in Xfce: It will pull in say
> polkit-gnome but still not work.
That's exactly why it's not the app's job to pull in an authentication
agent. (Any application (as opposed to desktop environment / workspace)
package with an explicit Requires on a specific agent is broken and needs to
be fixed.)
> 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.
The OnlyShowIn change would be breaking "random other WMs" anyway, if they
expected polkit-gnome to run. And if not, why do you care where the
autostart file sits? If it's OnlyShowIn=GNOME;, it'll have no effect for you
anyway.
Kevin Kofler
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