future of at_console

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 05:29, Michael Biebl<mbiebl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/6 Lennart Poettering <mzqohf at 0pointer.de>:

>> 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.

Well, the whole point is not to have two authoritative databases, not
so much to get rid of of pam_console.

The entire concept of at_console at the D-Bus level is pretty flawed.
In most cases you really only want the active session and not some
rather dumb "it's logged in" state, so I still think if it's possible
we should kill that thing.

Care to provide a list of the "quite a few" services so we can take a
look at them who really might need that.

Thanks,
Kay