pam_console

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 01:43:10PM +0000, Jack Tanner wrote:
> Bill Nottingham <notting <at> redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > 
> > I think it's time to retire pam_console from the default configuration.
> > 
> > For device permissions, we already have the hal/consolekit support which
> > should be use.
> 
> That may well be correct, but I have no idea how to use hal/consolekit. I
> suspect few Fedora users do. Try polling your question on fedoraforum, and see
> what those results tell you. I recently posted a question there about
> configuring alsa permissions for mpd and the answer I got there was pam_console.
> Mind you, I am ready and willing to learn the brave new hal/consolekit way of
> things. I looked for docs and examples for hal/consolekit, and found nothing
> relevant to my use case.

In fact, pam_console is already not used anymore for many devices, usb
devices, for example. The switch has been done since a long time.

In my opinion it was not ready at all at that time (and still not ready),
and not only because of lack of documentation, also because consolekit
was used without proper integration, but I have rehashed that so much,
it is not really needed to do it again.

> Bottom line: before you blow away pam_console, please spend some time doing
> education (e.g., documenting) and outreach (e.g., responding on fedoraforum)
> about the new proper way of doing things that accommodates 80% of the existing
> use cases. If you want to be thorough about it, consider the software (like mpd)
> in a few prominent third-party repos, too.

Are you sure that mpd is relevant here? Isn't it higher layer than
pam_console/hal...?

Even before doing education, talking with other about the design, how
it integrates with pam, xdmcp, X and so on and so forth would have been
even more important, and it wasn't done right, in my opinion.

--
Pat