Bug 534140

Summary:	clarifications for the pklocalauthority man page
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Andrew McNabb <amcnabb>
Component:	polkit	Assignee:	David Zeuthen <davidz>
Status:	CLOSED UPSTREAM	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	12	CC:	davidz, mclasen
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2009-11-12 18:51:29 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Andrew McNabb 2009-11-10 17:43:52 UTC

The pklocalauthority man page is unclear on several points, and I think there are some simple changes that would improve it:

1) The man page doesn't contain any examples of a Local Authority Configuration file (although it does contain examples of .pkla files).  A short example or two would make a big difference.

2) It mentions that the configuration file is a "key file", but it would be helpful to point out that these are also commonly called "ini files".

3) It says that there is a "Configuration group", but in the context, it's not entirely clear what this means.  Even a minor rewording would be helpful: "a group called '[Configuration]'" instead of "a Configuration group".

4) The man page doesn't explain any way to override settings from earlier config files (the built-in files say "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE, it will be overwritten on update.").  Is there any way to, for example, remove the "desktop_admin_r" group from the AdminIdentities?

5) The files in /var/lib/polkit-1 refer to specific groups like "desktop_admin_r".  Is there any way to use a different name for the "desktop_admin_r" role?  For example, if a heterogeneous environment already has a "wheel" group, they might want the "wheel" group to be treated the same as the "desktop_admin_r" group without having to monitor upstream changes to files in /var/lib/polkit-1.

Thanks for all of your work on PolicyKit.

Comment 1 Andrew McNabb 2009-11-10 17:44:54 UTC

Also:

6) The manpage doesn't describe /etc/polkit-1/nullbackend.conf.

Comment 2 David Zeuthen 2009-11-12 18:51:29 UTC

Thanks for the suggestions. Fixed in

 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/PolicyKit/commit/?id=8fff882210e464620c550100069db944a4d73c88

This will be in a 0-zero update for F12.

Comment 3 David Zeuthen 2009-11-12 18:52:38 UTC

(In reply to comment #1)
> 6) The manpage doesn't describe /etc/polkit-1/nullbackend.conf.  

Hmm, this should be in a pknullauthority(8) man page. However the purpose of the null backend is mostly to serve as an example of other backends. Maybe we shouldn't install it.