To move forward with bringint NM 0.7 out of the package.mask and into stable systems, we should try to make the dependency on PolicyKit optional. The easiest way to do this would be to always return FALSE whenever PolicyKit is queried for privleges in NetworkManager. Gilles' first version of a patch is what does exactly this. This would probably only break retrieval and storage of system-setting, and NM 0.6 did not allow any of that either. What would be the alternative?
An alternative would be to sort out remaining issues with policykit. This package have been masked in the tree for a way too long. You can try to escape it as long as possible, but please note more and more things are using it. Patching NM that way, will only create security risk and personally I wouldn't like to see this approach. I sent an email to eva and remi offering my help to bring official PK support. I will gladly sort out all non-DE related packages (HAL, NM, pulseaudio, libvirt, others) and all KDE stuff, and help as much as I can with gnome stuff. My main question is - WHY PK is still masked? # Saleem Abdulrasool <compnerd@gentoo.org> (23 Nov 2007) # These might break automounting, so keep them masked for now. Sorry, but _might break_ doesn't sound to convincing to me - especially when it was added in 2007. Since it's OPTIONAL for almost everything in the tree (same as other auth mechanisms - PAM or SASL) and it DOES work ok with packages which require it - like NM (I have it enabled for ALL packets supporting it - patched packages with --disable-polkit/--without-policykit), so why mask? This also brings one other issue - package.use.mask. It should be used only for things which are known to break - as there is no easy and documented way to override it. Currently it's misused or even abused by adding things like kde-base/solid -networkmanger. This is causing lot's of confusion for users and generate unneded bugs (#259840). As far as I know, there is no official maintainer of PK and maybe that's why it's so hard to push any changes. As mentioned above - I would like to see it officially supported and I'm willing to spend as much time as it's needed to iron it out. Rob
Like I said in my replies to those mails, any help is appreciated as soon as it gets more concrete that "I'm willing to, ..." or other vague promise of help. You are not the first user asking why PK is not unmasked and to all of those I've answered mostly the same as I did to you: 1. there is no maintainer for it right now, and nobody seems to be willing to assume the task. 2. staying PK-free these days is still possible and gnome team and I are making our best to keep it that way for multiple reasons that I will probably blog about some day. 3. we've been served the security issue for shuting down your own personnal computer which you have physical access to (and I'm still laughing about it). 4. there is mostly no knowledge base about PK and nobody (not only devs) seems to be willing to write a short doc about how to setup PK (and don't tell me it works out of the box, I've experienced this is not true). To sum up, maintainer and doc are the most blocking points. Now I'd appreciate you let this bug stay on focus and open another one if you really feel for PK being unmasked.
I'm sorry if my previous comment went too far away from focus of this bug. In regard to your comment: 3. we've been served the security issue for shuting down your own personnal computer which you have physical access to (and I'm still laughing about it). You wouldn't laugh it that "own personal computer" would be a public computer in a library - where everyone have access to and not everyone should be able to power it down (especially if it doesn't have any power/reset buttons, powers up automatically at 6am in the morning and can be shut down only by the system software). You also wouldn't like some "I can hack it" kid to mess up with your network settings just to prove he can, would you? The bottom line is - it's unsafe to remove auth mechanism without any replacement.
for the record I've given up on finding time to make my computes policykit free. For now it's not getting in my way with USE="-policykit" so I'm fine with that.
There's nothing we can do about upstream decision here. Policykit/polkit is there and it seems it's not going anywhere. If you still believe it should be optional, please file upstream feature request.
