Alan:
On 05/ 4/11 10:37 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
The authors of systemd (RedHat's rough equivalent of SMF) have decided that systemd should replace ConsoleKit: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2011-May/002166.html They're even being upfront by stating they will not support non-Linux. Given that Ubuntu has it's own equivalent (upstart) and not all other Linux distros have chosen systemd, it will be interesting to see if this gets more pushback than those who killed HAL& DeviceKit, since it won't just be BSD& Solaris they're telling to go ***** themselves this time, but a significant number of other Linux distros too.
Ubuntu's choice of Unity over GNOME Shell seems to also be a fairly significant split in direction amongst the Linux community. I expect GDM will follow the direction set by GNOME Shell, so this may encourage Canonical to also move away from GDM as well. LightDM seems a likely candidate. Is HAL's death real or heresay? Some of the plans Red Hat makes seem overly ambitious. For example, here is the presentation that Jon McCann from Red Hat gave about the ConsoleKit and GDM roadmap at GUADEC in Istanbul in 2008: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1027&bih=667&source=hp&q=jon+mccann+gdm+istanbul&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=c47720ba43ce4197 I am still waiting for the PAM/Authentication System rewrite (slides 45-54), Trusted Path features (slide 58), and VT rewrite (slide 59). The GDM "factory" mode was never finished and ConsoleKit development has been lethargic lately. This makes me wonder how many of these plans is action versus talk.
Perhaps the real lesson learned is that any *Kit API that claims to provide a platform neutral abstraction is doomed to abandonment as overly complex and hairy once it gets adopted widely enough to have been ported to all the platforms, and it's not worth the headache trying to keep up.
I hate to jump to conclusions, but it is hard to not wonder when the HAL/DeviceKit plans of the day change so often. The Sun Ray team, I think, would prefer if Sun Ray were well integrated into a display manager that worked on both Solaris and OEL and other Linux distros in general. I think we need to wait for the dust to settle more before we can decide how this talk will impact the future of ConsoleKit and GDM on Solaris. Brian _______________________________________________ desktop-discuss mailing list desktop-discuss@opensolaris.org
