Dear Devuan Devs,

as most of you who follow DNG or #devuan-dev may already know, some of
you (and to a much lesser degree myself) made an effort to have elogind
in combination with policykit act as a drop-in fix to allow most of the
major DEs be fully functional in ASCII, without having to fork, modify
or rebuild any of their respective core components.

At the bottom of this message I appended a draft "call-to-action"
intended to be posted on DNG, and possibly other places.

If this course of action is approved of by you Devuan Devs, I would go
forward and prepare the disk image mentioned in the draft. It will
probably be created using refracta9_nox_amd64_beta (thanks, fsmithred!)
and ideally already contain all of the DE agnostic components necessary
to act as a testbed to examine authentication related DE features.

Please comment about any issues you see with this approach in general,
or the draft document in particular. Furthermore, please let me know
your thoughts on where such a call to action should be posted - I don't
follow any fora or the like, so I wouldn't know!, and also I would
appreciate any directions on where to best put the test image, and any
other procedural hints.

Thank you so much for your support, and generally for making Devuan a
thing. Special thanks go to Andreas Messer, Hleb Valoshka, and KatolaZ
for being particularly supportive in the last days, and for bearing with
me. :)

Looking forward to learn about your thoughts!

Best regards
Urban


Draft message follows:

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Dear fellow Devuan users,

in a collaborative effort the Devuan Devs discovered a way that could
allow users to use virtually any of the desktop environments offered
in the repositories without suffering from degradations like crippled
shutdown or reboot GUI functionalities, or facing problems mounting
removable media as normal user in their favorite file manager.

The proposed way of using a combination of elogind and policykit1 will
probably only constitute a stop-gap solution on the way to reach the
long-term goal of freeing Devuan of all systemd dependencies. It will
however allow to release Devuan2/ASCII in a timely manner, and with
not only a select few, but virtually all major desktop environments
fully supported.

This is where you can help: We need as many people as possible to test
the proposed setup. For this purpose we prepared a minimal ASCII based
system image that can be run in a virtual machine, so you won't have
to butcher your own valuable installations in order to help testing.

The image already contains all essential packages needed to install a
desktop environment of choice. Preferably, you should investigate a DE
you are already somewhat familiar with, so you would already know your
way around and can easily spot problems with respect to certain features.
The test procedure assumes you have at least basic knowledge on how to
operate a virtual machine and install packages.

The list of desktop environments we are particularly interested in
encompasses, but is not limited to (in no particular order):

    KDE/Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, Cinnamon.

(Note: The more adventurous among you may even go further and have a
stab at GNOME, though it is doubtful, if it can easily be coerced into
obedience without having actual systemd installed.)

After bringing up the system in a virtual machine you would ideally
just have to perform the equivalent of

    apt-get install task-<YOUR-DE-OF-CHOICE>-desktop

to create an environment that enables you to perform at least the
following tests:

    1. Check, if you can successfully login to, logout from, restart
       and shutdown the system via the respective standard GUI controls
       provided by the DE in its default setup.

    2. Check, if removable media, e.g. USB thumb drives or CD-ROMs, can
       be click-mounted in the default file manager that comes with the
       DE.

    3. Take note, if you observe any inconsistencies or degradations in
       basic desktop features, that could possibly be attributable to
       user authentication or session issues.

Please prepare a short report listing your observations about what did
or did not work, and post it in response to this message. We will gather
these reports to get an impression, if the proposed solution would
constitute a viable way to bring the next Devuan release one step closer
to being the universal operating system it strives to be.

Note: The provided system image is not even close to being an official
beta preview of ASCII, but instead is provided solely for the purpose
discussed above. While you may use it for any other purpose you deem
fit, you do so at your own risk!

Thank you all for your continual help and support in the endeavor to
make Devuan the number one freedom-of-choice OS!

The Devuan Team

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