Changes to polkit-desktop-policy

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 2:22 PM, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> Once upon a time, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> said:
>> The point is that that in the default flow now, you get both; and
>> there is no plan to change this; correct?
>
> If you don't have a root password, how do you log in for single-user
> mode, manual fsck, etc.?  AFAIK those only prompt for the root password,
> not a username.

I will follow up briefly here to say that this kind of issue comes
down to the fact that thinking in terms of users and passwords is
wrong - you need to step back and think in terms of "deployment
targets", which boil down to "(at least one) user owns machine"[1],
"timesharing unix server", "lab workstation" and "kiosk" mainly.

For the user-owns-machine target, we obviously have to provide some
hatch for them to "do whatever"; currently that's the root password.
But the root password is silly for this model because they can just
boot with "init=/bin/sh" and do whatever.  So fsck would need to
recognize this and probably just refuse to boot by default, but
obviously it could be configurable.

Presently we have a big mess of tools which are obviously all
configurable, and I'd say the target is vaguely "lab workstation",
except for a few PolicyKit files which move the default OS install
closer to "user owns machine".

[1] A lot of people call this "single user laptop/desktop", but in
fact this target can be multi-user, just as long as least one person
owns the hardware, and it has nothing to do with laptops or desktops.