[ConsoleKit] Impact of ConsoleKit deprecation

[Brian Cameron]

Olav:

This is regarding the announcement of ConsoleKit deprecation on the
distributor-list[1].  Looking at the discussion about this announcement
on the release-team mailing list[2], it seems that Lennart and others
said there is value in having systemd and ConsoleKit co-exist.  For
example, Lennart said in the release-team thread, "I figure that means
that we probably have to keep code for CK compat in GNOME, if CK
matters."

How was the decision made that CK does not matter and needs to be
deprecated?  It seems odd to deprecate an interface that your 
announcement says only 1 distro (Fedora) has concrete plans to move
away from.  The announcement says Mageia and openSuse will "likely"
follow, but this hardly sounds definite.

The topic of ConsoleKit deprecation was last discussed on the
ConsoleKit forum last May[3].  At that time, I asked questions and
highlighted the importance to to have ongoing ConsoleKit support in GDM
on Solaris.  Nobody seemed to make a real effort to respond to me, and
it does not seem that my comments were taken much into consideration as
decisions were made.  Really, it does not seem there was really much
public or transparent community discussion about this, or did I miss it?

> 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.

While I may not have been the most active GDM maintainer lately, nobody
bothered to ask me or even inform me that I participated in making a
decision to deprecate GDM's use of ConsoleKit.  Until I got your
announcement, anyway.

Although D-Bus, ConsoleKit, and systemd may all be FreeDesktop
specifications, is there harmony between various popular display
managers, how they work, and what standard interfaces they plan to
support?  Do we know of plans for display managers like GDM, KDM or
LightDM to standardize on common freedesktop.org interfaces?  Can you
point to  serious discussion amongst the maintainers of free display
managers about these topics?  Or is everybody doing their own display
manager thing under different "FreeDesktop" projects?

> 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.

Solaris has delivered GNOME 2.30 on Solaris 11 with ConsoleKit, and
will likely be supporting this for years to come.  Is Solaris the "one
distribution" you refer to, or are there others?  If there are more
than one distro planning to continue using GDM with ConsoleKit, then
there may be opportunities for us to work together.

The Solaris distribution delivers some enhancements that makes
GDM & ConsoleKit support MultiSeat features that is similar to what
systemd provides (but less automagical).  It works pretty well, but
perhaps more like the way MultiSeat worked in GDM before version 2.21.
These changes are in the wip/multi-seat branch of ConsoleKit and GDM.
Do any other distros have any interest in working together to support
ongoing MultiSeat support with ConsoleKit/GDM?

Brian


[1]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/distributor-list/2012-January/msg00002.html
[2]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2012-January/msg00031.html
[3]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/consolekit/2011-May/000143.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/consolekit/2011-May/000145.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/consolekit/2011-May/000144.html