Bug#496723: tasksel: Please add consolekit to the desktop task

[Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org>]

Package: tasksel
Version: 2.75
Severity: minor

Hi,

a standard GNOME or KDE desktop installs tools like gnome-power-manager,
kpowersave and network-manager-(gnome|kde). This tools are used for 
powermanagement and network configuration and they access HAL and 
NetworkManager via D-Bus.

Historically, Debian used group based policies, to allow access to those
services, i.e. in order to mount removable media, suspend/hibernate your 
laptop or configure your (wireless) network, you had to be in the groups
plugdev, powerdev and netdev.


As (co-)maintainer of packages like kpowersave, experience over the last 
year has shown, that this approach has it's downsides. A lot of users
complained that basic stuff like suspend does not work out-of-the-box [1], 
only to learn that they have to add their users to the above mentioned groups.
For unexperienced users this can be quite challenging and unintuitive.

A alternative approach has been implemented using consolekit.
When this package is installed, it allows access to the HAL and NetworkManager
service using the at_console policy, i.e. all locally logged in users can
access the D-Bus services without the need to add them to all the different
groups. You can still configure access via groups, this new methods is
complementary.

For a better out-of-the-box experience I'd like to see consolekit installed by
default as part of the desktop and/or laptop task in lenny.

Thanks for considering,
Michael


[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=484248


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (300, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26.3
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages tasksel depends on:
ii  aptitude                      0.4.11.9-1 terminal-based package manager
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.23     Debian configuration management sy
ii  liblocale-gettext-perl        1.05-4     Using libc functions for internati
ii  tasksel-data                  2.75       Official tasks used for installati

tasksel recommends no packages.

tasksel suggests no packages.

-- debconf information:
  tasksel/title:
  tasksel/desktop: gnome
  tasksel/first:
  tasksel/tasks: