a message header flag for interactive authentication?

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday 26 August 2014 21:22:24 Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Well the way I see it is that pretty much everybody who uses dbus needs
> an authentication framework, that fills in where dbus built-in policy is
> not enough. Any real-life application needs something like this, dbus is
> simply not that useful without it. Pretty much all our system daemons in
> the general stack that use dbus actually hook into polkit, due to that...

While I agree that system services do need authentication, polkit is not the 
only solution. Other frameworks may need other types of metadata. Please see 
the Cynara framework being developed for Tizen.

> So, in my opinion polkit should probably never have been considered
> distinct from dbus, it should not have been a project of its own i guess,
> it should probably have been named "dbus authentication" instead...

Quite possibly, but it's too late for that. I don't want to dive into this 
part of the discussion if it's moot.

> Hence, given that this is how it is, I am pretty sure this is not just
> arbitrary use metadata, but very close to how dbus is used in almost all
> of the cases, and hence deserves the header flag...

It deserves some kind of metadata. But I think restricting it to one boolean 
is shortsighted.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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