Features/UserAccountDialog

User Account Dialog

Summary

A user account dialog.

Owner

• Name: Matthias Clasen
• Email: mclasen@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 13
• Last updated: 2009-11-13
• Percentage of completion: 10%

We have lots of (somewhat dated) design and scoping work that was done in Spring 2008: http://people.redhat.com/mclasen/user-account3.pdf.bz2

Ubuntu seem to be plan working on something similar, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Lucid/UserAccountManagement

Detailed Description

The goal of this feature is create a single tool that allows to create new users and edit user-related information in single-user systems or small deployments. Big deployments and enterprise-level systems are not a target (we think those are better-served with a web interface for their directory server...).

The tool will (at least partially) replace the functionality of several existing components, such as system-config-users, gnome-about-me, the former gdmsetup, firstboot, the former polkit-gnome-authorization...

Use cases that we hope to cover are:

• Creating the first user when the system boots for the first time
• Editing your own account data
• User account maintenance
• Configuring the login screen
• Temporary access to the system (guest account)

Benefit to Fedora

A user account dialog has been missing for a long time. It will make the Fedora Desktop more complete and narrow the gap to other operating systems.

Scope

• The dialog itself needs to be written.
• A dbus service providing user data needs to be written.
• Several desktop components should be modified to use the service as well, the most prominent one is gdm.

How To Test

TBD

User Experience

Users will have a single place to edit their account data and similar user-related data.

For an idea how this tool will look, see the mockups in http://people.redhat.com/mclasen/user-account3.pdf.bz2

Dependencies

• SSSD: The DBus service would ideally rely on SSSD for most of its data storage needs. If SSSD is not ready or does not provide what we need, we can temporarily use our own data storage.
• PolicyKit: We want the dialog to be able to assign privileges/roles to users, for which we will rely on PolicyKit. PolicyKit 1.0 in F12 already provides the necessary framework for group-based policies (see the polkit-desktop-policy package), but minor adjustments might be necessary.
• gdm: We want the dialog to be able to configure certain aspects of the login, e.g. autologin. gdm needs to provide some interface for this.
• The dialog supersedes the functionality of several existing components: system-config-users, gnome-about-me, the former gdmsetup, firstboot. These will need to be obsoleted or adjusted to avoid the overlap.

Contingency Plan

Stay with the current set of tools.

Documentation

TBD

Release Notes

TBD

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/YourFeatureName