Proposal for ConsoleKit distributor-list announcement

[Olav Vitters <ovitters gmail com>]

Dear release team dudes and Mr.Lennart,

Due to the d-d-l thread and because we should, I plan to announce two things to distributor-list.

1. ConsoleKit deprecated and the impact
2. relying on the API of those systemd daemons

Below is for #1

I said we wouldn't support consolekit in either GNOME 3.6 or GNOME 3.8. I just those versions completely up. :P leaning towards 3.8 though; we should have some time to ensure systemd-login thing is without bugs (which I expect is after having it in a distribution; in practice: Fedora) so any different implementations don't have to be adjusted continuously.

Note: the message is basically a call for arms. Either they do something, or less functionality on their distro/OS. This for people from FreeBSD, Solaris and Ubuntu. Perhaps others as well (Debian?).

Does below message look ok? I actually have not too much clue about what consolekit is supposed to do. Nor if it is feasible to say that Solaris/FreeBSD/Ubuntu should just ensure the exact same API is available.

I've cc'ed Lennart btw. Please keep him in copy.

Regards,
Olav

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Subject: Impact of ConsoleKit deprecation on GNOME

The ConsoleKit project at freedesktop.org has been deprecated. This has certain implications for GNOME as we cannot rely on ConsoleKit or the functionality 

it provides. GNOME will not rely on ConsoleKit if it remains to be deprecated and unmainted.

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 will use it. The inevitable result of lack of maintainership of the freedesktop.org ConsoleKit and the unavailability of a replacement in all current supported systems will lead to a loss of functionality.

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.

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.

Ideally, if systemd is not to be used, please provide the same API. GNOME currently requires just ConsoleKit. We do NOT want to support the systemd API, foobar1 API as well as the baz2 API. This from a maintenance standpoint; #ifdefs means more possibilities for untested code and thus bugs.

To repeat:
In case you have a distribution which uses ConsoleKit, please see this as a pre-warning that in approx. GNOME 3.6 or 3.8, the ConsoleKit dependancy will be 

removed.

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.

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