PolicyKit authentication agent changes

[Jaroslav Reznik]

On Saturday, February 26, 2011 04:15:38 pm Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > Please try to look beyond the rim of your KDE teacup for a moment. What
> > about the DEs / WMs that do not provide a polkit agent? Shouldn't we
> > make things like virt-manager just work in *every* environment?
> 
> Well, the DEs which don't provide their own agent should pick one to
> require instead.
> 
> > We could even go one step further and question your approach: I need to
> > use some KDE applications and due to the monolithic packaging I also
> > need to install kdebase-workspace. But I never start KDE, so why am I
> > forced to install a second polkit agent then? I have to admit that I
> > don't know the answer to this question and requiring polkit-kde looks
> > like the best solution because my situation is a corner case.
> 
> Well, the real problem there is some apps dragging in kdebase-workspace. In
> principle, libplasma having moved to kdelibs should have solved this, but
> there are still parts of Plasma in kdebase-workspace which get dragged in
> by some plasmoids (which indeed aren't always separately packaged), and
> there are also some other things in kdebase-workspace getting used by some
> stuff. This is quite unfortunate; IMHO, those libs should really move to
> kdelibs! Once we dragged in kdebase-workspace, you're already getting
> KWin, KDM, Plasma etc.; polkit-kde is just a drop in the water. :-(
> 
> > s/the/an. 'The' agent can only be used if there is one.
> 
> There should be exactly one which is supposed to run on the desktop you're
> using, otherwise you end up with #657006.
> 
> > Which basically means that you don't care about all DEs / WMs in Fedora
> > being (more or less) broken because we cannot run many of our
> > system-config-* tools there.
> 
> I do care. But I think it's their job to actually provide a complete
> environment (through external Requires if necessary), not the
> application's.
> 
> > Please take the time to read my initial proposal or my previous mail. I
> > said that all agents *but* *one* should have OnlyShowIn. The remaining
> > one gets "NotShowIn" to not conflict with the others. I suggested this
> > one to be lxpolkit because it has only a few deps and will be pulled in
> > by yum if all other providers match of because it's name.
> > 
> > If anybody has a better idea, I am keen to hear it but so far nothing
> > sounded convincing to me.
> 
> Actually, I don't see anything wrong with the idea of lxpolkit setting
> itself as the agent to run in all the non-GNOME non-KDE desktops, and the
> change mclasen did to polkit-gnome doesn't actually preclude that. (Quite
> the opposite, since there now isn't a second agent trying to run in the
> same desktops.) It's really up to the maintainers of the respective
> desktops and of lxpolkit to decide how they start the polkit agent. As
> long as your DEs actually Require lxpolkit, it doesn't matter whether the
> autostart file is carried in the DE or in lxpolkit itself. (FWIW, we have
> no plans to move polkit-kde's autostart file out of polkit-kde. It's
> OnlyShowIn=KDE; anyway, and the package is required by kdebase-workspace.
> I don't see a need to fix what's not broken.)
> 
> What I disagree with is the idea of applications being responsible for
> requiring such a desktop service. This just doesn't work, because they
> can't know which desktop's service should be dragged in.

Kevin,
I agree with you - I see polkit agent as integral part of DE. Other DEs/WMs 
makes me worry too, lxpolkit is a sane option.

R.
 
>         Kevin Kofler

-- 
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

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