PolicyKit releases and !AWOL

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-12-06 at 11:32 -0500, Doug Klima wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > First sorry for not being more active on the list. Been busy with lots
> > and lots of stuff including PolicyKit and trying to put my thoughts down
> > about the next major version of HAL (basically a rewrite, more on that
> > soon!). 
> >   
> Not looking forward to this at all. After all the work that all the
> distro maintainers have put in to patch HAL and to fix a lot of the
> bugs, it seems a bit worrisome to throw away all that knowledge and code
> review.

No knowledge is being tossed out. There's a few specific problems with
HAL that will require architectural changes that warrants a rewrite. The
codebase right now is 50-100k LOC. A rewrite will be much smaller.
Anyway, this is hardly the thread to discuss these matters; when I have
the writeup of how, why and when done we can talk about it.

> > Second, and the reason I'm surfacing from hide + seek, here's a new
> > PolicyKit release
> >
> > http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit-0.7.tar.gz
> > http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit-gnome-0.7.tar.bz2
> >
> > For all intents and purposes, software (such as intlclock, PackageKit,
> > gnome-system-monitor, pulseaudio and so on) built against PolicyKit 0.6
> > will continue to work unmodified with 0.7 (there's a few semantic
> > changes in API that mechanisms don't use but not enough to warrant
> > bumping the so-name since we're pre-1.0).
> >   
> Are these documented somewhere?

No, this is a pretty young project that has not reached a lot of
adoption. As I said, mechanisms are all fine. The only API changed is
the one used by the PolicyKit command line tools and the PolicyKit-gnome
authorization editor.

> Again, this smells of "here's a code drop from Red Hat rather then
> working with the community at large which now depends on this software
> since GNOME has made it a requirement". 

Drop the conspiracy theories and please stop spreading misinformation.
It's off-putting. The fact is that PolicyKit is not a "requirement" at
all for GNOME; see the desktop-devel-list archives for details where I
made that very clear. I also mentioned to propose it for 2.24 and in the
same mail mentioned it wasn't ready for this for 2.22.

> I'm glad it's been reviewed by
> Red Hat people on Red Hat systems. Has it been tested on any other
> systems. There's already reports of basic Makefile mistakes and
> compiling issues in the IRC channel.

Someone from Gentoo did file a bug for build fixes which I applied weeks
ago. 

> This is where release candidates would be nice or some notification
> prior to a release.

This is a pre-1.0 project; lots of changes are going in. If this was
widely deployed I'd agree with you but it's not.

> These documents have a lot of "fill me in" sections. Also, they
> reference a DTD which doesn't exist and hasn't existed since PolicyKit
> started, I've been providing feedback about this issue for months.

Sure, we'll fix that eventually. The reason I haven't done this specific
thing

 - Is because it's simply not very necessary  because PolicyKit already
   ships a validation tool

 - I don't want to commit to the DTD just yet. It may change.

> This is a bit of a catch-22 since feedback (i.e. all the bugs on
> Freedesktop.org's bugzilla.. all the bug's on Red Hat's bugzilla) seem
> to be ignored. E-mails to you and the ML are not consulted between
> releases (you said it yourself).
> 
> I'm not the only one with these frustrations, I've seen them echoed on
> the ML and in IRC as well as by users trying to take advantage of these
> apps for new apps of their own.

I'll hope to be more responsive in the future.

     David