Re: Proposed external dep: PolicyKit

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi,

(adjusting Cc list)

(Polite request: please avoid sending HTML mail)

On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 22:34 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 1:47 PM, David Zeuthen <david fubar dk> wrote:
>         On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 15:57 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
>         > Going off topic a bit: It would be really nice if PolicyKit
>         had a proper
>         > web page and mailing list. It's too important for
>         information on it to
>         > be so fragmented.
>         
>         
>         Right. I'm actually going to try and fix this (dedicated
>         mailing list
>         and website); stay tuned.

JFYI there is now 

http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/polkit-devel
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PolicyKit

and has been for some time. There's been a bugzilla on fd.o for a long
time.

> I am tracking relatively unstable development repositories. As a
> result, I have hal 0.5.11 installed which appears to
> have--undocumentedly--suddenly required PackageKit as a hard
> dependency. For example, removable storage mounting no longer works if
> PK is not installed due to the way that the default dbus fdi rule is
> written. 

News to me, it's still optional according to the NEWS file

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=blob;h=9dadda7da29d4c18dff6e71d343cd5eb69561c56;hb=95bd4f1bf9a62f1551461841d64f6f1cdea6a92e;f=NEWS

Did you file a bug or complain on the hal mailing list? This mailing
list is not the right place to complain about it anyway.

> Aside from the hal harddep problem, it appears that PK is sorely,
> sorely missing its documentation. For example, having this new
> dependency thrust upon me would have been fine if things
> like /usr/share/doc/policykit-gnome/README didn't contain:
> 
> TODO: write me
> 
> If RH is going to thrust PK on us, please, please, please provide some
> kind of documentation (not an API reference). When things don't work
> (as they aren't now and were previously) I have absolutely no idea
> what's wrong, where to look or who to blame. Most importantly, I
> wanted to file a bug but couldn't even manage that with the spectular
> lack of information out there.

There's this

 http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
 http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit-gnome/
 (and this is even an older snapshot of what comes out of the tarballs)

which is much more than API reference etc. Did you even read it?

FWIW, all the distros and even advanced users with "building from
scratch with weird configuration permutation" like you have not
whined/complained in the same way I'm seeing here. For them PolicyKit
just works and adds value. Hell, some KDE people wrote their own
Authentication Agent that uses Qt and KDE. So it's not like it's a huge
mystery what PolicyKit-gnome does. If you're not able to figure it out
given the code and existing docs then you probably never will. Anyway.

(Even users from some of the historical problematic distros like
Slackware (as in usually outdated libc headers, no PAM etc.) can make
this work for them.)

So maybe you just haven't tried hard enough. In other words, I believe
it's more of a you-problem, than a PolicyKit problem. Either way, this
thread / mailing list is not the right place to ask for help, use the
polkit mailing list. Also send patches if you think the existing docs
are not good enough; some of the docs could surely use some improvement.
After all, this is open source and all, no one promised you a pony etc.
etc.

> Luckilly, Rob Taylor was gracious enough to point me in the right
> direction from what he has in his own memory. Alas, correcting for an
> obvious packaging error hasn't solved to problem so I'm stuck again.
> I'm sure others would not be even this fortunate...

I'm sure others would have used the appropriate forum, not some random
thread on a somewhat unrelated GNOME mailing list, and they would have
gotten the help they needed. I'm also sure they would have been precise
about what was wrong instead of just whining.

(And, while we're at it, here's some more advice: please cut the
company-bashing ("If RH is going to thrust PK on us...") and drama. It's
really off-putting and it makes it hard to take you seriously.)

Good luck,
David