James: > What I get out of ConsoleKit's specification is that it provides a dbus > interface and makes it easier to do fast user switching support.
Correct, although, as I said, on Linux they do have some ideas of making ConsoleKit a utmp/wtmp replacement. Though I think its too early to tell how that will progress. > Though as stated at > http://people.freedesktop.org/~mccann/doc/ConsoleKit/ConsoleKit.html > "This API is not yet stable and is likely to change in the future." so > it;s wise to not use it. It's all about sessions, much like a cookie > works for web authentication and provides a number of methods to check > properties which can be used for both console and graphical login > applications. Since we don't do fast user switching in particular, it's > not useful. Correct me if I'm wrong about fast user switching though. > > Though in some sense I can see why it would be desired, as it's part of > freedesktop in all, but for OpenSolaris at the moment I can't see a > direct benefit of using it. Actually, Sun is in the process of integrating VT support into Solaris. Not sure exactly when this will happen, but the value in adding ConsoleKit support will be greater once that happens. That said, GDM does support VT without ConsoleKit. I think it is likely that Sun will support VT without ConsoleKit initially, and then migrate to using ConsoleKit when it makes sense, like when the interfaces become a bit more stable, and when the new GDM rewrite is ready for Solaris integration. The main reason the new GDM rewrite isn't yet ready for Solaris integration is it doesn't support managing more than a single display (though it can manage multiple displays as if they are a single display). The GDM community is currently working to fix this issue. Once that is addressed, it will be a lot easier to integrate the new GDM and ConsoleKit into Solaris. I suspect this will happen in the GNOME 2.26 timeframe. -- Brian
