[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] policykit-1: Why for years in experimental

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 10:43:41 +0100, Jan Luca Naumann wrote:
> some time ago I asked about the reason why there is no current version
> in Debian testing/unstable but only in experimental?

The version in experimental relies on the mozjs (Spidermonkey) JavaScript
interpreter, to evaluate rules written in JavaScript. Some of the
maintainers consider this to be a problematic design choice and strongly
prefer for the rules to be declarative, as they were in version 0.105.

There is a thread about this on the upstream mailing list every year
or so, but none of them have really reached a conclusion. I do not have
a strong opinion either way, so I can't usefully defend or oppose the
decision to use JavaScript. Options that have been proposed include:

* keeping JavaScript and mozjs
* keeping JavaScript but switching from mozjs to duktape, a smaller
  and more portable interpreter
* going back to the old "local authority" declarative language, as used
  in 0.105
* switching to a new declarative language

All the significant changes from new versions, except the JavaScript
"authority", have been backported into the version in testing/unstable
(please report bugs, preferably with patches, if you find exceptions
to this).

At some point if time allows I want to forward-port the "local authority"
(the declarative rules backend) from 0.105 to the current upstream
version, so that instead of applying all the upstream changes except the
JavaScript authority to 0.105, we are using the upstream version but
reverting the addition of the JavaScript authority. This would have
the same practical result, but would hopefully be more maintainable.
However, I haven't had sufficient time to do this.

    smcv