Re: Proposal for ConsoleKit distributor-list announcement

[Olav Vitters <ovitters gmail com>]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 04:34:43PM +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
> Dear release team dudes and Mr.Lennart,

Whoah, great feedback! Seems like pretty much everything is arranged.
Still, I'd like to send an announcement.. because although it seems like
everyone is informed already, best to still send a general announcement.

Rewritten it as follows. Purely about ConsoleKit, not the daemons. It
seems like keeping ConsoleKit code is best for now, so written with that
assumption in mind.

I've added a hint that they should just use systemd.. might result in
some revolt.. but in my personal opinion distributions should take that
into account. No systemd while lots @ upstream use systemd --> bugs.

Btw: Maybe Canonical will maintain the Solaris stuff. I don't care. I
prefer the warning doesn't assume that.

> ====================================

Subject: Impact of ConsoleKit deprecation

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 will use it. 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