I've been looking at some permissions issues lately. It strikes me that
the Linux system has become much more complicated over the years. There
are a couple of issues.
First there is Linux-PAM. This has been around for a long time. I
often wonder why it is needed. I used to try to ignore it, but there
are just too many applications that seem to require it for that. I do
know that it can be useful in a multi-user environment using ldap for
logon credentials, but how common is that?
Second is polkit. This is something that is only useful in a graphical
environment with multiple users. What is it's purpose on a laptop? On
a server without Xorg? Again, there are many apps that seem to demand it.
A quick look for polkit dependencies in the book show hat it is needed
for upower, udisks/udisks2, colord,
network-manager/network-manager-applet, gconf, polkit-gnome, lxsession,
consolekit, and thunar-volman. All of these have polkit either required
or recommended.
Third is consolekit. The packages that use it are kde-workspace,
lxde-common, lxqt-common, pulseaudio, networkmanager, sddm, lxdm, and
xfce4-session. All of these except pulseaudio and xfce4-session have
consolekit required or recommended. Additionally ConsoleKit is not
being actively maintained. They now say to use systemd-logind.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/ConsoleKit/
To make things worse, to implement this applications like upowerd,
polkitd, console-kit-daemon, etc are run as daemons even after a
graphical session is terminated.
-------
To me, all these permission applications are only needed in an
environment where there are multiple users on a system. In addition, if
there are multiple users, they need to be using a graphical desktop.
How many Linux systems in use fall into this category? I really don't
know but I suspect it is a low percentage.
-------
What we are doing in BLFS is building these packages because upstream
developers have programmed them into useful applications, not because
most BLFS users need them.
What we are not doing is giving much advice on configuration. I found a
nice page on the Arch wiki that explains how to get around the unneeded
seat/session stuff for udisks:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udisks#Configuration
We might want to include this in the udisks sections and similar polkit
configuration instructions in other sections.
-- Bruce
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