[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#946231: Versions, Upstream version versus Debian version

[Jan Luca Naumann]

Dear all,

since one concern pronounced in this bug report was that there is no
automatic migration. Therefore, I developed a helper script to convert
most kinds of pkla files to the JS-based format (see attachment). I
created a merge request in the upstream repo as well if they want to
include the converter as well [1].

Maybe it is now possible to upgrade polkit to a newer version including
the new-style rules?

Best,
Jan

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/merge_requests/66

On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 00:25:41 +0000 Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Dec 2019 at 23:07:00 +0100, Geert Stappers wrote:
> > Upstream is at version 0.116 ( https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/tags )
> > Debian version is 0.105-something ( https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/polkit/blob/master/debian/changelog )
> > 
> > Debian changelog talks about changes from upstream version 0.114 and 0.116.
> 
> The latest upstream version is available in experimental.
> 
> The version in unstable is exactly what its version number indicates:
> a very old upstream version, with the majority of the upstream changes
> from later versions backported into it via debian/patches.
> 
> The reason for this is that upstream version
> 0.106 removed the "localauthority" backend (which
> configures polkit via .ini-style files like for example
> /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.Flatpak.pkla,
> which can be overridden by sysadmin configuration in
> /etc/polkit-1/localauthority or /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority)
> and replaced it with a new JavaScript-based backend (which
> configures polkit via short JavaScript fragments like for example
> /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/org.freedesktop.Flatpak.rules, which can be
> overridden by sysadmin configuration in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d).
> 
> The migration path between the two is not obvious, and some of the Debian
> maintainers of polkit are strongly opposed to it being configured with
> JavaScript files, so at the moment we are stuck with polkit 0.105.
> 
> One day, I want to stop patching changes from 0.11x into 0.105,
> and instead start patching the "localauthority" backend into 0.11x,
> so that we can stick to the upstream version in all respects except
> for the configuration backend. However, all the maintainers of polkit
> (both in Debian and upstream) mostly work on other things, so it's rare
> that someone has enough uninterrupted time to do something like that.
> 
> There has been some upstream unhappiness with the current configuration
> arrangements, mostly because the mozjs library that is used for the
> JavaScript interpreter does not have a stable API; so it is possible that
> a newer upstream version will either change the configuration language
> (again), or change the JavaScript implementation to something more friendly
> (most likely a smaller interpreter like duktape).
> 
>     smcv
> 
> 
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