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Pardus 2008 comes with lots of new features, each feature deserves to be blogged seperately, this one is about our configuration manager COMAR...

(R)evolutions in FreeDesktop world effected Pardus, like many other distributions. Among all Pardus projects, COMAR was most effected one, probably. The RPC protocol used for service, process and client communication in 1.* releases replaced with DBus, and access control job transferred to PolicyKit.

D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another. In addition to interprocess communication, D-Bus helps coordinate process lifecycle; it makes it simple and reliable to code a "single instance" application or daemon, and to launch applications and daemons on demand when their services are needed.

PolicyKit is an application-level toolkit for defining and handling the policy that allows unprivileged processes to speak to privileged processes: It is a framework for centralizing the decision making process with respect to granting access to privileged operations for unprivileged applications. PolicyKit is specifically targeting applications in rich desktop environments on multi-user UNIX-like operating systems. It does not imply or rely on any exotic kernel features.

You can see User-Manager (which uses DBus to communicate COMAR) using PolicyKit to obtain authorization through authentication.