[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Re: Ubuntu's hal changes which are appropriate for Debian

Martin Pitt mpitt at debian.org
Thu Apr 19 08:15:22 UTC 2007


Hi Michael,

Michael Biebl [2007-04-18 23:23 +0200]:
> seems my first email got mangled by Thunderbird. So here's a second try.

Heh, I already wondered. :)

> >   - Privilege reduction:
>
> Definitely needs some closer investigation to not mess something up.
> Sjoerd, what's your opinion on this?

In Ubuntu we have done things like this from day one, and until we got
hald-runner from Sjoerd, Debian did it as well.

> Just a quick note: Why don't you remove haldaemon again from the various
> groups on purge? Is this intentional?

Yes, it is. It is a bad idea to remove users in postrm in general. And
since we do not remove the system user, I see no reason to modify it
either.

> >   - debian/hal.init.dbus: Use actual init script path in usage help, not
> >     hardcoded /etc/init.d/hal (since it is actually in /etc/dbus/event.d).
> >     (LP #84642)
> 
> For Debian, we decided to get rid of /etc/dbus-1/event.d/. The dbus init
> script in unstable already has the required functionality for this.
> In the foreseeable future we will transition the start script of
> network-manager, dhcdbd, hal etc. to regular sysv init scripts.

I see. Same for Ubuntu, except that we want to eventually convert them
into upstart rules. This does not make the patch invalid, though.

> >   - debian/hal.postrm: Check mode ($1) properly.

I guess that's fine?

> Do you know about Ubuntu's plans regarding pm-utils?

We simply didn't make up our minds about that yet, since until today
we were busy with release stuff. But in general we follow the path of
Debian.

So this patch will eventually become obsolete. Let's not worry about
it for now, then.

> >   - debian/patches/55_nonpolkit-mount-policy.patch: Implement a policy check
> >     if PolicyKit is not available: Only allow mounting of removable devices
> >     to non-root users.
> 
> I already had this patch added for 0.5.9 but removed it in anticipation
> of PolicyKit. I'm still a bit undecided, if we should enable PolicyKit
> support in hal.
> For now it's probably safer to use your patch and disable PolicyKit (and
> ConsoleKit) support in hal for now.

The patch is written in a way that it does not change anything when PK
is enabled. That's why I think it is a very good idea to apply it,
otherwise hal will allow anyone to mount any fixed hard disk.

> fwiw, I started packaging gnome-device-manager [2], which works also
> fine with hal-0.5.9.
> So, we can either ship both for now (and using your patch) or already
> transition over to the new g-d-m.

I would be more than happy to transition to g-d-m, especially since we
have a SoC project now which wants to extend it with some features (in
close cooperation with upstream).

> >   - debian/patches/59_add_ssb_bus.patch: Add support for devices on the SSB
> >     bus; patch by Matthew Garrett.
> >   - debian/patches/63_fixup_macbookpro.patch: Extend 10-macbookpro-utils.fdi
> >     fixes to more MacBooc models; patch by Matthew Garret.
> 
> I leave this up to Sjoerd, I really can't comment on that.

The second one has been applied upstream in a simplified version. The
first one still needs a spec patch and will then move upstream as
well. It's not very important, though, so feel free to skip it for
now.

> Thanks a lot for your efforts. It's really great that you push your
> changes back to Debian. To improve this even further, would you be
> interested in joining the pkg-utopia group so we can work more closely
> together? We could keep the diff smaller this way, which would meand
> less work for you in the future.

I am not sure TBH. It might create the incentive to just apply Ubuntu
patches to the Debian SVN without discussing them properly first.
Although I think that I have enough common sense to apply the obvious
bug fixes immediately and send the others to the ML for discussion,
just as I did now.

With cupsys, I started an Ubuntu branch in alioth, thinking that this
would make it easier to merge patches back and forth. After doing that
I had to learn that svn does not have real branches :( That pain might
also be responsible for my reluctance to join alioth projects...

In Ubuntu, hal is maintained in [1], so maybe bzr-svn will help here.

Thanks,

Martin	

[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/hal/ubuntu

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org
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