Re: Proposed external dep: PolicyKit

[Colin Walters <walters redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 15:37 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote:

> Considering that PolicyKit is just one mechanism to support
> authentication management, I guess I do not really understand the
> need to make PolicyKit mandatory.  Since GNOME is free software, I
> would think that if Sun, or anybody, wants to add support for
> alternative systems, such as RBAC, that this would, at least, be
> considered.

Yes, I think Jason was being unfair; as far as I know RBAC predates
PolicyKit, and obviously Solaris can't just drop it in the near future.

However - I do think it makes sense for a technology like this to be
integrated into the desktop.  For example, with PolicyKit the developers
were able to create a nice user experience for changing the system time
directly from the clock applet.  If Solaris goes with Visual Panels, it
would be good to at least consider how you approach that level of
integration - maybe it's as low-tech as exec'ing "visual-panel
--show-control=system-time", but this way we at least cooperate on where
the hooks for the desktop/system integration are.  

If the story is simply that they're patched away and you have to go to
some special "Administration" menu, the user experience is worse, in
addition to being farther away from upstream code-wise.