[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#526006: please add a warning to the libpam-ck-connector description for users of startx

[Scott Barker]

Package: libpam-ck-connector
Severity: wishlist


Users who start their X session using startx from a text terminal will have
a lengthy debugging session facing them after their next full logout/logon
if they install libpam-ck-connector. All sorts of things will not work
correctly, including suspend/hibernate, mounting of removable media, access
to pulse-audio, etc. This is due to the new consolekit/policykit method of
doing things, and the fact that libpam-ck-connector sets XDG_SESSION_COOKIE
in the text logon, preventing the Xsession scripts from correctly adding
ck-launch-session in the $STARTUP command (see bug # 520720 at
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=520720 for an as-yet
inconclusive discussion on this matter)

There are various "fixes" available for this, but they are either
non-obvious, introduce security holes, or involve customizations that will
prevent the end user from benefitting from future improvements to the debian
X startup procedure (due to having xinitrc, xsessionrc and/or xsession files
in the home directory).

The simplest solution to this problem is to purge libpam-ck-connector. After
doing so, I have had no more issues related to consolekit/policykit.

I would like to suggest that a warning be added to the description for
libpam-ck-connector, for example:

  If you use startx from a text terminal to start your X session, you
  probably should not install this package, as it is likely to prevent you
  from accessing most dbus and hal related functionality in your X session,
  such as suspend/hibernate, mounting of removable media, access to
  pulseaudio devices, etc.

In addition, please change the control file for the consolekit package to
only Suggest libpam-ck-connector, instead of Recommending it, so that it is
not installed by default.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.iso8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages libpam-ck-connector depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.9-4      GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libck-connector0              0.3.0-2    ConsoleKit libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3                   1.2.12-1   simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libpam-runtime                1.0.1-9    Runtime support for the PAM librar
ii  libpam0g                      1.0.1-9    Pluggable Authentication Modules l

libpam-ck-connector recommends no packages.

libpam-ck-connector suggests no packages.