PolicyKit confusion

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 01:27:23AM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
> couldn't give a shit about network drives. One scenario is network goes 
> down and I get a screenful of error messages- it annoys the shit out of 
> me, let alone scaring illiterate users.

If the network goes down, network drives won't work. Your users will be
sad/scared/frustrated with or without error messages, I'm guessing.

> > I don't think enough people care to make it really work under FreeBSD. I've
> > certainly never missed it.
> They don't care too much under linux either.... So many years, yet not a 
> single user doc anywhere on any of the f***ing monsters! Goddamn linux 
> devs- ever heard of KISS?! How about a user doc for something so bloody 
> confusing it takes a brain surgeon to figure it out?

That's exactly why I've avoided using this stuff. :-)


> Ahh, one more thing of note here: polkit-gnome-authorization would not 
> work under any circumstances (run as root or otherwise) to change 
> policies! WTF!
> > You might take a look at devd(8) as a FreeBSD alternative, but I'm not sure if
> > it notices new da devices popping up.
> >
> Oh, believe me I'd happily jump on it rather than deal with this mess. 
> But I can't find anything that will interact happily with the apps, 
> mount network shares of all kinds, and be exceedingly user friendly 
> (take note lin-devs: user-friendly != sys_admin-hell at least it 
> _doesn't have to_).

Another way to go about it is to install e.g. ubuntu on a virtual machine and
peek under the hood how it works there. But as you say it's probably tied into
udev pretty tightly. 

> How forgiving is devd to a user pulling the plug to early? I did look 
> into it a bit, but it appeared nearly as difficult as deciphering the 
> above scenario- that said, having come through the other side of that 
> I'm not so sure my judgment was very accurate :) So now I might check 
> that fork out and see...

Devd just gets some notifications and acts on them. There is a problem with
mounted usb devices, but that is one of architecture, I guess. Devd only gets
notified _after_ a device has been pulled. There is no way you can prevent
data loss in all cases like that. On windows you're supposed to "prepare to
eject" a USB device before pulling it out as well. The only "cure" is to mount
a device syncronously, and disable _all_ write caching for those devices. If
you try that you'll find that doing so has significant performance impact and
not in a good way (disks are sloooow). 
 
> God! What a mess... this belongs in the X-files: the truth _is_ out 
> there. But you might lose your head and many years of life just finding 
> the fragments!

FreeBSD is on my personal desktop and laptop, but that seems to be the
exception rather than the rule. Maybe you should write your experiences up and
submit it to the freebsd-doc mailing list for inclusion in the official docs?

And talking about mailing lists, maybe you should try your luck on the
freebsd-gnome list?
[http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-gnome] 

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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