Re: libgnomesu [was Re: Proposed modules: my consensus so far]

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi Carlos,

On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 18:08 +0100, Carlos Garnacho wrote:

> > 	One thing that occurred to me when looking at
> > libgnomesu was that
> > usermode is no more Red Hat specific than libgnomesu
> > is e.g. JDS uses
> > usermode without any problems. If we find that GNOME
> > has a need for this
> > kind of functionality, then perhaps it makes as much
> > sense for usermode
> > to be included in GNOME as libgnomesu?
> 
> For me it could be worth asking why isn't it even
> included optionally in some other distros, I'm taking
> the Debian example, a distribution that has thousands
> of packages and that hasn't still packaged this makes
> me think a bit...

	I think there's a number of reasons:

  1) Some of the functionality (e.g. poweroff/halt/reboot and the 
     notification area icon) is predicated on pam_console and 
     pam_timestamp being available. This isn't in upstream PAM, but is 
     shipped as part of our PAM package - so the source for those 
     modules is only available as a patch against upstream PAM.

  2) Its in Red Hat's (public) CVS, releases are only on Red Hat's 
     FTP server - there's just never been any attempt to push it
     as not being Red Hat specific.

	I don't know the "why" for either of these, but I suspect it was just
down to a lack of time. Nalin would know for sure if there's any other
reason.

	There's no reason why it can't be fixed though - I was particularily
determined to make it work on JDS so I packaged the two PAM modules on
their own and usermode itself was just a trivial packaging task.

> Dont take me wrong, I just want to be sure that we
> won't make modules depend on things that distros will
> refuse to package

	Oh, indeed. I agree.

	The "distro" that would probably refuse to ship usermode is Solaris ...
but you'd want some patience (and balls) to get anything like usermode
or libgnomesu past the Solaris ARC :-)

Cheers,
Mark.