Re: GNOME 3 status update

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 16:15 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote:
> =================================================================
> Complete migration from HAL to DeviceKit-* by 2.27.3

This also includes libudev/libgudev - the latter is available in udev >=
143 which was just released.

> =================================================================
> NOT COMPLETED.
> According to "jhbuild rdepends hal --direct" the following modules still
> depend on HAL:
> * brasero: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581742
> * cheese: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583640
> * gnome-power-manager FIXED:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565867

Also, gvfs needs porting but Martin Pitt is on top of this:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=586410
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=586409

I'll review and commit Martin's patches shortly.

> * Porting to PolicyKit 1.0
>   PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gdm, gconf, gconf-editor,
> gnome-applets, gnome-panel, gnome-session

With PolicyKit 1.0, the model has changed [1] insofar that we don't need
to make clients of mechanisms using PolicyKit aware of PolicyKit itself.
So the port, GNOME-wise, actually only includes ripping out support for
PolicyKit, in particular the libpolkit-gnome.so.0 library which is no
more. 

There are a couple of pieces of GNOME software where we also provide our
own mechanism - GConf is one of those. But with the way things work,
this dependency isn't exposed in any public API, e.g. it's possible to
port the GConf defaults mechanism to use another authorization framework
if the OS happens to supply one.

Finally, there is still a polkit-gnome project. This package contains a
PolicyKit Authentication Agent (to pop up authentication dialogs when
needed) and will also contain a tool to modify the local authority (not
yet written but will be done before 2.28). This project does not provide
any API, only said Authentication Agent and the tool.

FWIW, Matthias done a great job both porting apps as well as creating /
maintaining this page

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PolicyKitOne

which is useful for both distributors and the GNOME project itself.

I guess all this means that PolicyKit doesn't even need to be an
external dependency anymore; e.g. basically no apps need to be aware it
even exists.

Hope this clarifies.

    David

[1] : See

 http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/PolicyKit-1.8.html

for more information about how this works. In particular this change
means that our GNOME software is much more portable insofar that OS
vendors / distributors / sites / etc. can plug in their own
implementation of the Authority.