Replacing polkit JS backend

[Michael Biebl]

Hi!


2017-10-21 19:28 GMT+02:00 Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>:
> On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 03:40:40AM +0100, Ikey Doherty wrote:
>> I've opted to make it an **alternative** backend to ease migration,
>> thus:
>>
>>  --with-backend=js|keyfile
>
> Nice. I'm personally super in favor of it. Not speaking for Red Hat
> officially, by any means. From a pure Fedora point of view...
> I don't think we have many users taking advantage of the javascript
> format, but if there are, I would prefer to not break them.

I'm very interested in this. I personally was never a huge fan of the
JS based polkit version. mozjs is just a huge PITA.
Martin Pitt, as co-maintainer of polkit in Debian, even less so, which
is why all Debian and Ubuntu derived distros currently still use
policykit 105 (+ a huge load of backported fixes).

So far, we didn't have many users which came to us asking for the
additional flexibility provided by the js-based rules.
The notable exception is the Debian postgresql maintainer who wanted
to use the the more granular polkit filtering that systemd allows.
See the PR Jasper mentioned.

Can something like this be expressed in the new keyfile format (at
least to some extent)?

That said, I'd be happy if this new keyfiles format would be something
other distros (most notably Fedora/Redhat/openSUSE) could agree on. At
least from the Debian side (and I assume by that extension Ubuntu)
there definitely would be interest in having a common format again
which is used by everyone and not as limited as the old pkla format.

Regards,
Michael
-- 
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