PolicyKit-authentication-agents in Fedora

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Samstag, den 17.04.2010, 22:17 -0400 schrieb Matthias Clasen:

> So, I don't think I said 'hardcoded'. I don't care how hard or soft you
> code it. The point is that it should be the responsibility of the
> desktop environment to ensure that a polkit agent is available, not the
> responsibility of individual apps or of polkit itself.

How do you want to cover the cases where users have no desktop
environment installed then?

> For GNOME, I'll simply move the polkit-gnome-authentication-agent
> autostart file from polkit-gnome to gnome-session. 

This means that other desktops can no longer make use of polkit-gnome
and user or have to provide their own desktop file. This means users can
no longer choose which agent to start. What's so bad about choice? Xfce
users might want to choose wheter to use lxpolkit or polkit-gnome.

I still don't understand what the benefit of moving the desktop file is.
90% of all users will have both packages installed, the one that
provides the agent and the one that provides the autostart file. This
means 90% will not notice a difference, but for the remaining 5%, things
will likely break.

>From a packaging POV the autostart file clearly belongs to the
application it starts just as a normal desktop file belongs to a
package.

> No. Again, the responsibility for starting the agent lies with the
> desktop, not with polkit. I frankly don't care if you 'build your own
> desktop'. In that case, your favourite polkit agent is just one more
> thing to throw in your .Xclients file.

IMHO things like openbox, fluxbox or icewm should be supported without
having to configure anything in .Xclients. They all work nicely with
autostart, IMHO there is no reason to break this.

Regards,
Christoph