Vincent Lefevre <vinc...@vinc17.net> writes: > On 2014-07-22 19:54:10 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> logind is also not mandatory in Debian now. It's just required, >> upstream, by all the major desktop environments. > Not just by all the major desktop environments. It is also needed by > hplip via dependencies[*], which is quite surprising for a "HP Linux > Printing and Imaging System". > [*] hplip -> policykit-1 -> libpam-systemd -> systemd > Or is there any abuse of a dependency here? Someone with more detailed desktop knowledge should read this over and correct it as necessary. This is just my understanding of what's going on, and I don't work with the software in question and could be wrong in some details. There is a general class of problems around "let the user on console do <thing>" that were originally controlled via UNIX groups. The problem with doing this via UNIX groups is that either you need complicated PAM machinery to add supplemental groups based on whether the user is on console, or you have to change the security model to "users who are allowed to use the console but may not be on console at this time," which poses other problems. PolicyKit provided an alternative way of handling those problems, and I suspect that's why HPLIP depended on PolicyKit. It allowed a more direct expression of rules like "only users on console can do this." However, PolicyKit has basically been orphaned upstream, replaced by the rewritten polkit, and I believe polkit depends on logind to provide core functionality around knowing what users are on console. So anything that had switched from something group-based for handling this problem to PolicyKit has probably moved or is moving to polkit, which relies on facilities currently only provided by logind. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87fvhr3c11....@windlord.stanford.edu
