Re: Proposed external dep: PolicyKit

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Colin:

> 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.

Oh, I agree.  I very much support PolicyKit and I agree that it should
be an official GNOME dependency.  I am just not sure it should be
"mandatory", though perhaps I was reading too much into that word.
Obviously Sun does not mind if PolicyKit is a hard dependency of modules
that we do not intend to ship, such as GNOME System Tools, package 
management tools, etc.

In fact, I very much support PolicyKit.  Jim Li and I have worked
together to make a Solaris PolicyKit spec-file available so we can
evaluate it and so users can download and build it if they want to
use it, and help get it working.  It's available via the Solaris
spec-files-extra repository.

> 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.

The Sun GNOME and PolicyKit teams are working together to make sure that
Visual Panels is well integrated into our desktop.  However, I know the
Visual Panels team is working hard just to get the functionality right.
So it might take some time to get all the polish together.

> 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.

Good point, and thanks for the pointers.

Brian