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

[Jan Luca Naumann]

Dear Simon, Dear Martin,

thank you for your fast response :)

The background of my question was that at work we wanted to use the
feature to allow user to manage single systemd units (for example see
[1]). To our knowledge this requires the features of the JS-interface.
Thus we are curious if there is a solution for such problems available?

Best,
Jan

PS: Add a colleague to the discussion

Am 12.03.19 um 11:36 schrieb 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
>