Comment 0 for bug 1153224

At the last UDS we decided to finally drop the long-abandoned ConsoleKit and migrate to logind: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-1303-consolekit-logind-migration

I fixed current raring's logind package (from systemd source) to actually work standalone, so we can use it without the init bits.

However, as some packages like gnome-session require a newer version than 44, I would actually like to update this to the current upstream version 198. A working package is in https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/+archive/logind/+packages . This involves a soname bump of libudev, but as the ABI didn't actually change that much, that will mostly be some 50 rebuilds. (Note that libudev1 works fine against the older udev, and vice versa). Please note that while udev has been merged into the systemd source, I do not propose to update udev to version 198 at this point. We first need to review our current changes and apply that to the current udev, and it is not clear whether doing that in raring is appropriate. So this FFE does *not* include a request for an updated udev, we'll continue to use the standalone version 175 for the time being.

This PPA also has a number of packages which move from ConsoleKit to logind for session tracking. As most upstream moved to logind long ago, this is usually very trivial: Add libsystemd-logind-dev build dep, enable the corresponding configure option, done.

The blueprint has a list of reverse dependencies that should be migrated, and an archive grep has been done to find packages which talk to ConsoleKit's D-BUS API without a declared dependency.

However, we don't need to do this in lockstep: logind and ConsoleKit work just fine side by side, so at no point during the transition there will be a state where a package is broken. I still would like to convert as much as possible (read: all packages which have logind support in the current raring version), and I have some time reserved to do this. I figure that Stephane Graber, James Hunt, Steve Langasek, and/or the desktop team can also give a hand with this.

For the record, I run my workstation with consolekit purged since Friday, so that I see the missing bits (which would otherwise continue to use CK and thus work just fine).

While this is quite a large change, I believe that the risk is relatively low. logind has been tested and used in Fedora, Arch, some Debian developers, and other distributions for over a year now, and many upstreams like NetworkManager, GNOME, upower, udisks etc. do not test with CK any more. In fact, GNOME 3.8 drops support for Consolekit, which blocks the Ubuntu GNOME remix (for raring) and Ubuntu itself (for raring+1) from updating to a newer GNOME.