[ConsoleKit] [gdm-list] Impact of ConsoleKit deprecation

[Brian Cameron]

It seems a number of distros are planning to provide ongoing support for
ConsoleKit.  To me, it also seems odd that decisions were made about
deprecation and namespace changes without first having more open
community discussions amongst a representative group of stakeholders.
I appreciate Olav raising this topic, so we can discuss.  The
distributor-list forum has been too quiet lately, especially
considering all the GNOME 3 changes going on and considering the fact
that a number of GNOME advisory board representatives have raised
concerns about technical leadership in the GNOME community.

I do think this is an example of when significant technical decisions
seem to have been in the GNOME community made without good community
discussion.  GDM is the primary consumer of ConsoleKit, and as a GDM
co-maintainer who happens to work for a distro that is a case-study
for plans to provide ongoing support for ConsoleKit, I feel that
communication has been poor with me.  If I feel this way, I imagine
others do too.

I would have appreciated more discussion on relevant forums like the
ConsoleKit or GDM mailing lists.  I think I am subscribed to all the
relevant mailing list, and there seemed to be no real discussion about
this in the 8 months between May, 2011 and January, 2012.  It did not
seem that the code review in the bug report even really started to
happen until just this month.

The only documentation links provided in the announcement was a link to
a bug report and information that is focused only on Fedora.  It seems
little effort was even made to provide any documentation to help
distros or end-users with this transition.  Perhaps my expectations of
good documentation for interface changes like deprecation are too high.

It seems that the ConsoleKit maintainers made these decisions and the
rest of us were just notified.  It seems Martin Pitt was made the new
ConsoleKit maintainer without a clear understanding of who the
stakeholders are.  Perhaps my issue is one of expectation.  Maybe I
should instead expect that this is just how things work and are
documented in the GNOME meritocracy?

Brian


On 01/27/12 03:50 AM, Antoine Jacoutot wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 10:11:21AM +0100, Frederic Crozat wrote:
>>     Am I the only one concerned by this name change ? I don't see the point
>>     at all, just give credentials to Martin (and maybe some Solaris folks
>>     like Brian) to maintain the current code on freedesktop, while
>>     explaining it is deprecated.
>
> FWIW I think this would make more sense.
> I'm also volunteering helping to keep OpenBSD support in it. I have sereval patches for it that we are currently using; the reason I didn't try to push them is that ConsoleKit was unmaintained. If some folks agree to keep it alive at least a little longer, than I'll be happy to submit my patches.
>