<defaults> in policy declarations

[Matthias Clasen]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Chris Masone <cmasone at chromium.org> wrote:
> Hi, folks.  I've written some custom DBus services, and I'd like to use
> PolicyKit to control who's allowed to send messages to them.  I see that
> there's this notion of default behavior for "any", "active" sessions and
> "inactive" sessions, but I have a few questions about the semantics here:
> 1) What constitutes an "active" session?  "inactive"?

This is touched upon in the ConsoleKit documentation here:
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/ConsoleKit/doc/ConsoleKit.html
Admittely, you have to read a bit between the lines to find out that a
session is active if it controls the hardware associated with the Seat
it is associated with. In other words, it a session on the current vt
is active, while a session on a different vt is inactive (think
user-switching).

> 2) what do the following acceptable values mean?
> auth_self_one_shot
> auth_self
> auth_self_keep_session
> auth_self_keep_always
> auth_admin_one_shot
> auth_admin
> auth_admin_keep_session
> auth_admin_keep_always
> I looked at the reference manual online, and no explanation was really
> provided.  Where can I go to figure these things out?

For these, you want to refer to the polkit(8) manual page, e.g here:
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/polkit.8.html