[ConsoleKit] Future of GDM & ConsoleKit

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 18.05.11 20:58, Brian Cameron (brian.cameron at oracle.com) wrote:

> When Simon Zheng, Halton Huo, and myself designed these interfaces, the
> intent was that they could be extended to support device management.  I
> am sure that the "Devices" line in the design for
> /etc/ConsoleKit/seat.d is too primitive and needs work.  But it seems a
> starting point to discuss.

The new scheme we have come up with in systemd does not use any such
configuration. In the best case seat configuration is completely
automatic and seats are dynamically created simply by plugging the right
hardware in.

Configuration is then only necessary if you use a combination of hw that
cannot be recognized automatically. 

Also, all of this is solved inside udev, which simply puts the right
tags on the devices popping up.

All of this is very different from the old approaches. i.e. there's very
little actual infrastructure which binds seats together. Primarily seats
simply appear because properly tagged hardware devices show up in the
system.

> For the sake of discussion, can we explore the idea of continuing to
> support ConsoleKit interfaces?  If this is not possible, then it would
> be interesting to know why.  Could ConsoleKit and a systemd-based
> solution share a common (or extended) D-Bus API?  Or is there something
> very fundamental about the two designs that is just incompatible?

I cannot give you a complete answer at this point in time, simply
because my new code isn't complete yet.

> If Linux moves away from using ConsoleKit in favor of systemd in GDM,
> then would it be reasonable for GDM on systems that do not have systemd
> to just continue to use ConsoleKit?

Of course, if we on Linux deprecate a component it doesn't mean that
everybody has to do so. You are welcome to continue using CK if you want
to and take over maintainership.

> It seems that GDM could support two backends for supporting multi-seat.
> One based on systemd and another based on this ConsoleKit work.  I
> realize this ConsoleKit-based approach does not yet support device
> management as well as the systemd proposal, but it is better than GDM
> not working on systems that do not have systemd at all, I should think.

I am not keen on "multi-backend" solutions really.

The thread on ddl was mostly about figuring out whether we have to keep
CK compat in gdm or if we can go all the way and rip that out.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.