Bug 94895

Summary:	Consider allow_inactive=yes for change-own-user-data
Product:	accountsservice	Reporter:	Alkis Georgopoulos <alkisg>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Matthias Clasen <mclasen>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	alkisg, marius.vollmer, rstrode, stefw
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	Allow remote/inactive users to change their own data.

Description Alkis Georgopoulos 2016-04-11 17:14:30 UTC

Currently, data/org.freedesktop.accounts.policy.in specifies that a user must be active in order to set his own data.

X2go, LTSP etc users are considered remote, i.e. inactive, and they are not allowed to change their own user data without authentication.
This results in a different behaviour when they e.g. try to change their language in the `gnome-control-center user-accounts`.

Furthermore, in some distributions it has been observed that change-own-user-data authentication dialogs popup when changing VTs or when switching users or sometimes even with just gnome-screensaver, possibly because the distribution is trying to update the user data (e.g. to notify the UI that he has new mails) when the user's vt was not active.

Therefore I'd like to ask you to consider setting <allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive> for change-own-user-data.

Ubuntu bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/accountsservice/+bug/1512002

Thanks!

Comment 1 Alkis Georgopoulos 2016-05-20 14:40:00 UTC

Ubuntu ended up accepting this patch:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/policykit-1-gnome/+bug/1512002/comments/44
- <allow_any>auth_self</allow_any>
- <allow_inactive>auth_self</allow_inactive>
+ <allow_any>yes</allow_any>
+ <allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>

...so that it works both for inactive local sessions, and for remote sessions like LTSP/ssh.

Could you please merge it upstream, or comment if it's not appropriate for some reason?

Thank you!

Comment 2 Ray Strode [halfline] 2016-05-20 15:21:09 UTC

seems okay to me.

Comment 3 Ray Strode [halfline] 2016-05-20 15:21:30 UTC

can you attach a git formatted patch and i'll push it?

Comment 4 Alkis Georgopoulos 2016-05-20 17:47:12 UTC

Created attachment 123943 [details] [review]
Allow remote/inactive users to change their own data.

I'm not very familiar with git, I hope the attached patch is OK.

Thank you!

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