Impact of ConsoleKit deprecation

[Olav Vitters <ovitters gmail com>]

The ConsoleKit project at freedesktop.org has been deprecated. Please
read this email if your distribution/OS plans to continue to rely on
ConsoleKit.

ConsoleKit currently runs under:
 - Solaris 11+
 - FreeBSD
 - Linux

Similar functionality is provided by systemd; however this is only
available on Linux. Furthermore, not all distributions are using it
right now. The inevitable result of lack of maintainership of the
freedesktop.org ConsoleKit will result in problems for your
distribution/OS unless you get involved in ConsoleKit development
(fork).

Due to the ConsoleKit deprecation:
 - Fedora will switch to relying fully on systemd:
   https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ckremoval
 - Mageia and openSUSE will continue rely on the deprecated ConsoleKit; due
   to current support of sysvinit fallback. From what we understood,
   they likely will rely on systemd alone.
 - A lot of GNOME developers will likely be using/testing using systemd
   based systems.

In case your distribution will not or cannot use systemd, the
deprecation of ConsoleKit means GNOME will (eventually) provide less
functionality. This means concrete action is needed if this
functionality is wanted within your distribution or OS. To make things
absolutely clear: ConsoleKit is a freedesktop.org project and the
maintainers have deprecated it.

Now, one distribution expressed interested in maintaining ConsoleKit,
but under a different name. It will still use the same API (dbus name,
etc). However, their interest is likely solely focussed around their
distribution and not anything else.

To repeat:
In case you have a distribution which uses ConsoleKit, please either
switch to systemd, or get involved with a fork of ConsoleKit!

To make it 100% clear: GNOME does not and will not rely on systemd.
However, we do rely on certain APIs. Those APIs can be implemented by
other components. Another message will follow which expands on this.

Reference:
 - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/ConsoleKit
 - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ckremoval
 - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=systemd

-- 
Regards,
Olav (on behalf of the release team)