KDM ConsoleKit Patch

[Kevin Kofler]

Hi,

Some time ago, I have developed a patch to support ConsoleKit integration in 
KDM. I originally based that patch on GDM's equivalent code (by William Jon 
McCann). Since then, many other distributions started carrying my patch (or 
some variant thereof), and as ConsoleKit registration is required for many 
core features of modern distributions to work, e.g. HAL (i.e. access to USB 
devices, among other things), PulseAudio (i.e. sound) etc., vanilla KDE is 
becoming less and less usable on current distributions.

There were 3 main objections to my original patch:
1. disagreement over whether KDM is the right place to implement this feature,
2. GPL code from GDM being introduced into the X11-licensed KDM backend,
3. code duplication, i.e. ConsoleKit interfacing code copied from elsewhere.
In addition, a way to enable/disable ConsoleKit support dynamically was 
missing.

Thanks in part to Patrice Dumas, I now have a new patch which resolves 
objections 2 and 3 and the enabling/disabling issue, by using ConsoleKit's 
libck-connector:
* ad 2, the GPLed code is gone and libck-connector is also X11-licensed,
* ad 3, the code is now in a common library
* and support for enabling/disabling is now handled through 
macro_optional_find_package(CkConnector).

This leaves objection 1, however my position there is that KDM is the right 
place, because the ConsoleKit authors believe this should be implemented in 
the display manager, and because including ConsoleKit support directly in KDM 
is a prerequisite for being able to support GDM-style fast user switching in 
a later stage. Unfortunately, Ossi, the KDM maintainer, does not agree with 
me on this.

For details on the above and for the patch itself, please see the RFE at 
bugs.kde.org:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147790

So where do we want to go from there? Do we really want to have most, if not 
all, major distributions patching KDE with the same patch?

        Kevin Kofler