Features/PolicyKitOne

Feature Name

PolicyKit 1.0

Summary

PolicyKit provides a flexible framework for granting users access to privileged operations. It is meant to replace the old userhelper approach, and overcome some of its shortcomings. PolicyKit 1.0 addresses architectural shortcomings of the initial PolicyKit design.

Owner

• Name: David Zeuthen

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 12
• Last updated: 2009-02-13
• Percentage of completion: 35%

PolicyKit 0.91 is the current release of the new PolicyKit. See the announcement

David has produced src rpms too [1].

The TODO list for PolicyKit 1.0 can be found here.

Richard has ported PackageKit to the new API (in a branch).

Detailed Description

The initial Releases/FeaturePolicyKit as introduced in Fedora 8 has some shortcomings. E.g. it is based on a library with suid helpers. The shortcoming that motivated the rewrite is that it is not possible to integrate it with directory services such as FreeIPA. The new PolicyKit is implemented as a system bus service and has pluggable backends that make it easy to integrate with directory services. It is one of the goals of the Features/SSSD feature to write such a backend. PolicyKit 1.0 itself will ship with a backend that uses the local filesystem to store action definitions and authorizations, similar to the current PolicyKit.

More details can be found in Davids announcement of the PolicyKit 0.90 release.

The current plan is to land the new PolicyKit early in F12 (as soon as it opens up, basically), and have most of the patches ready to port applications. The old PolicyKit 0.9 packages can remain for a while to ease the transition period and will be removed a few months into F12, when all users have been ported.

Benefit to Fedora

Making it possible to manage policies in a central directory service makes Fedora more suitable for larger, centrally managed installations.

Scope

• Package EggDbus, which is a depencency of the new PolicyKit
• Package the new PolicyKit, making it parallel-installable with the current PolicyKit
• Port supporting libraries such as PolicyKit-gnome and PolicyKit-de to the new PolicyKit
• Complete PolicyKit 1.0, including documentation and porting guide
• Port PolicyKit-using applications to the new PolicyKit:
  • NetworkManager
  • DeviceKit-disks
  • gnome-disk-utility
  • DeviceKit-power
  • gnome-power-manager
  • PackageKit (Done)
  • gnome-packagekit (Done)
  • kpackagekit
  • hal
  • libvirt
  • gnome-system-monitor (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495730)
  • ConsoleKit (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495617)
  • gdm (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498361)
  • pulseaudio (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=497621)
  • control-center (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498365)
  • fprintd (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498368)
  • gnome-panel (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498366)
  • gnome-applets (no mechanism here, should either just drop cpufreq applet or build without polkit)
  • GConf2 (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498370)
  • gnome-session (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=497619)
  • system-config-services
  • cups-pk-helper

User Experience

The authentication dialogs that are shown by PolicyKit will change in some aspects. The 'retain authorization' checkboxes will likely go away and be replaced with a status icon in the style of consolehelper-gtk, that lets you inspect and drop your retained authorizations.

Dependencies

• Features/SSSD not a hard dependency, but these two features will benefit from each other

Contingency Plan

Stay with PolicyKit 0.9

Documentation

API documentation can be found here.

A porting guide is being assembled here.

No user documentation yet.

Release Notes

TBD

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/PolicyKitOne