Migration to ConsoleKit2?
Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2016 1:08 am
Everybody who advocates *BSD to Linux people now and then knows some of the typical negative responses. One that at least I have heard frequently from people who were open towards alternatives in general is that with BSD there's simply too much old cruft around to feel confortable with it. The problem with this answer is that it's hard to counter - it's simply the truth and we have to take that blame. Well, the commonly mentioned HAL is probably one sad story of its own, but there are other things.
Asking for help with a problem here on the forums recently, I've stumbled upon a package that I haven't seen for years when working with common Linux boxes for years: ConsoleKit. Freedesktop.org has given up on developing it in favor of logind. So we're using a package (for the not so insignificant task of tracking users and sessions) that has not seen much attention since 2011/2012 and been officially unmaintained since 2013. Now we obviously don't have systemd (and rightfully so!) and the seemingly halfhearted effort that was "systembsd" didn't have any real impact after GSoC 2014 closed. So far so bad.
However there are other projects that don't want systemd and they also still need consolekit. And the good news is that an Xfce developer took over and revived the project as consolekit2 (https://github.com/ConsoleKit2/ConsoleKit2). It has been actively developed since 2014, the latest commit was made today. It's not a one man show (people like OpenBSD's Antoine Jacoutot have made commits), looks pretty healthy and best of all: It is obviously very *BSD friendly. OpenBSD has adapted it as their consolekit in ports for a while and obviously their desktops still work.
There's a port for FreeBSD, too, and the Xfce page on the FreeBSD wiki mentiones the SVN repo that holds it:
Does anybody have any experience with it, yet? If it works for GhostBSD: Could we replace the old dead consolekit with it? It would probably also make sense for vanilla FreeBSD to upgrade the port for it.
I've just installed it on a test machine with GhostBSD MATE and I'm rebuilding ports that depend on it. I'll report if I find any problems with it and then try again using GhostBSD Xfce.
Asking for help with a problem here on the forums recently, I've stumbled upon a package that I haven't seen for years when working with common Linux boxes for years: ConsoleKit. Freedesktop.org has given up on developing it in favor of logind. So we're using a package (for the not so insignificant task of tracking users and sessions) that has not seen much attention since 2011/2012 and been officially unmaintained since 2013. Now we obviously don't have systemd (and rightfully so!) and the seemingly halfhearted effort that was "systembsd" didn't have any real impact after GSoC 2014 closed. So far so bad.
However there are other projects that don't want systemd and they also still need consolekit. And the good news is that an Xfce developer took over and revived the project as consolekit2 (https://github.com/ConsoleKit2/ConsoleKit2). It has been actively developed since 2014, the latest commit was made today. It's not a one man show (people like OpenBSD's Antoine Jacoutot have made commits), looks pretty healthy and best of all: It is obviously very *BSD friendly. OpenBSD has adapted it as their consolekit in ports for a while and obviously their desktops still work.
There's a port for FreeBSD, too, and the Xfce page on the FreeBSD wiki mentiones the SVN repo that holds it:
Code: Select all
svn co https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/xfce4/trunk/sysutils/consolekit
I've just installed it on a test machine with GhostBSD MATE and I'm rebuilding ports that depend on it. I'll report if I find any problems with it and then try again using GhostBSD Xfce.