Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 18, 2014 19:57 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: Losing graciously by mathstuf
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Are you joking??? It just keeps getting better and better.

Now rules are not only opaque, they are not analyzable even in principle! Never mind dirty little tricks of JavaScript like using floats instead of ints for numbers.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 18, 2014 20:28 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, as long as you keep the JS to a subset which is not Turing complete (probably doable; avoiding loops accomplishes that). Other than that, I think the justification was that some policy decisions need more complex logic and JS was the easiest language to embed. I don't know how seriously languages like Perl, Tcl, and Lua was considered (I'm 100% OK with shell not being the language).

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 18, 2014 21:38 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't see how this can be done automatically, without writing something like SMACK for JavaScript.

Sigh... It looks like DBUS developers have gone off the rails completely and systemd+kernel people are happy to join the bandwagon.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 18, 2014 21:46 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

These aren't DBus developers; these are PolicyKit developers. There was a decently large thread on fedora-devel about it when it came out. I'm pretty sure that if you want to write a separate access mechanism than PolicyKit, DBus doesn't itself care. I don't know what KDBus will do here since calling back out to PolicyKit for every call seems to work at cross-purposes to some of the goals of it (the number of context switches mainly).