future of at_console

[Michael Biebl]

2009/8/6 Lennart Poettering <mzqohf at 0pointer.de>:
> Heya!
>
> So, what's the plan for at_console in D-Bus?
>
> There are two options:
>
> 1) deprecate it and get rid of it because it was a bad idea, and this
> should really be happening in polkit not in dbus itself. I'd be
> willing to prep a patch for that, which sets at_console for all users
> to FALSE and prints a warning if someone still uses that in the XML
> config files.
>
> 2) Keep it but replace the dreaded pam_atconsole /var/run/console
> checking mess we still have there with a tiny bit of code that
> actually reads the ckit database. We don't need to maintain that
> database twice and this would allow us to get fully rid of
> pam_atconsole. I'd be wiling to prep a patch for this, too.
>

3.) Keep support for at_console in D-Bus. Write pam_console compatible
tag files using a small session.d script in ConsoleKit [1] as we use
in Debian/Ubuntu. This still allows you to get rid of pam_console and
requires minimal effort.

There seem to be quite a few (smaller) D-Bus services where linking
against libpolkit would be a bit heavy weight and the coarse grained
at_console policy is sufficient. So imho it would make sense to keep
support for it.

Cheers,
Michael



[1] http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-utopia/consolekit.git;a=blob;f=debian/pam-foreground-compat.ck

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