new user creation module in firstboot

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 15:34 -0400, Ben Konrath wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm working on a new user creation module for the new and improved
> firstboot. I created a little video to give people an idea of the UI
> interaction:
> 
> http://bagu.org/scratch/createuser.ogv

This looks pretty smooth, thanks a lot for working on this. My first
reaction is that this is not something that should be limited to
firstboot; ideally stuff like that should be able to run from the
desktop environment when adding / deleting / managing users, right? 

If we want that we probably need to look at existing functionality in
the desktop.. that includes system-config-users (Fedora specific) and
the GNOME About Me dialog and how this would fit in. I'd probably say
that we want to replace both. And in the same breath I would approach
the GNOME community to get this done upstream so all distros can rally
around it (share development and maintenance efforts). What is your take
on that?

Also, if we want this in the desktop environment (and I think we do) it
needs to be written in a way that separates the mechanism (would run
privileged, e.g. uid 0 however locked down by SELinux or whatever) from
the user interface (would run unprivileged user). I'd probably suggest
to use PolicyKit [1] (for flexible fine grained lock down) and D-Bus
(for activating the mechanism) for that, both of these (especially PK)
are kinda written for this kind of thing [2].

Finally, it would be good to have this feature as a "Component" so it's
easy to embed into other applications; e.g. if I want to write a OS
installer app, then I can easily embed this component. Same, FWIW, goes
for the work we're doing on the clock applet and in the future any
system configuration bits. I think firstboot has /some/ notion of
plug-in architecture but actually haven't reviewed it since I'm not sure
it's appropriate in an environment where the UI should run unprivileged.
But it just might work.

     David

[1] : http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/

[2] : See e.g. http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=93 and http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=94
      for some background