On policykit and standards

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 08:09 +0200, Dario Freddi wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> I'm writing this mail after some promises from David, after waiting months 
> without a reply but just 2-3 lines in irc by chasing David from my last mail, 
> and after seeing that from 11th of May the activity on the Git repo has begun 
> again, and still nobody got in touch with me.
> 
> I will try to be very direct: I'm tired of the state of things. I'm tired of 
> seeing that you people define yourself as a "standard", but in the end you 
> fail in:
> 
>  - providing a stable API
>  - providing even the smallest information about development and API changes
>  - supporting anything that is not GNOME, and not giving a bit of help in 
> people who actually are trying to push your standard.
> 
> Let me remind you that a standard is a standard once many projects and many 
> distributions embrace it. At the current state of things, I can surely say 
> that there is no interest for me and for KDE to support polkit 1.0 (and I 
> fought through hell to make polkit 0.9 accepted in, as many people were 
> concerned about the approach and all the deprecated -grant and -dbus 
> libraries), unless you start showing some interest.
> 
> If you want to keep working the way you are doing it now, you will actually 
> end up in having what you started in the first place: a standard for the GNOME 
> desktop. maybe that's what you wanted, but if that's the case, I would 
> appreciate if you could move from fd.o to gnome git.
> 
> I'm sorry if I seemed rude; but I think it's even more rude ignoring people 
> that are actually supporting your cause. I sincerely hope I'll get a reply and 
> possibly a follow-up discussion on this.

Hey Dario,

I think that one thing you fail to understand here is that

 - There's not a lot of people working on software for the free desktop
 - Things like authorization and security aint exactly sexy topics
 - People working on some project usually also work on a bunch of other
   projects

and that's why things are moving slowly. Personally I'm, like a lot of
other contributors in free software, am stretched thin and work on more
than a handful of projects at the same time. And that's why there hasn't
been any updates nor time to write mails to a mailing list reiterating
the direction of the project or what I'm doing with a particular feature
and why. I mean, there's already

 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/PolicyKit/log/

If this was the only project I was working on, things would probably
look different but it's not so this is moot.

Btw, I resent the notion that PolicyKit is a GNOME-specific project. In
fact, with what will become version 1.0, the only two GNOME specific
bits are 1) an authentication agent (which is already in PolicyKit-gnome
in GNOME git); and 2) A simple editor for authorizations managed by the
local authority backend. And you can reimplement these all you want.

If I wanted to make this GNOME specific, I wouldn't have bothered with
designing the whole thing in a way so people can reimplement the UI bits
with another toolkit.

But, yes, I should have replied to your mail earlier but I was also
pondering what to reply. I mean, your mail was not very specific. I'll
reply right away anyway.

      David