Comment 16 for bug 455694

Subscribing release team. This will be a new binary package which will need to be seeded to desktop-common. It will contain one file (see below) which will allow common desktop actions without asking for the password if (1) the user is an administrator, and (2) is on a currently active foreground console.

The udisks privs part is currently shipped by the udisks package, but it's not a good fit there: udisks might eventually be used on servers as well, where such default privileges are not appropriate (they weren't shipped in karmic's devicekit-disks yet). Thus this part is not a behavioural change, just a change in packaging for flexibility.

The CPU frequency scaling is this bug. It's especially noticeable on laptops where people want to have some manual control over CPU scaling, and currently these auth dialogs make this a nuisance.

I also propose to allow changing the time and timezone by default on desktops. But if that is considered evil or questionable by anyone in -release, I'm also happy to back that out for lucid.

# cat /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/com.ubuntu.desktop.pkla
[Mounting, checking, etc. of internal drives]
Identity=unix-group:admin
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-*;org.freedesktop.udisks.change-system-internal
ResultActive=yes

[Change CPU Frequency scaling]
Identity=unix-group:admin
Action=org.gnome.cpufreqselector
ResultActive=yes

[Setting the clock]
Identity=unix-group:admin
Action=org.gnome.clockapplet.mechanism.*
ResultActive=yes

So in summary, I request an FFE for the new binary package, and for adding the two new privileges.