[Bug 1652282] Re: Xwayland not using XAUTHORITY, prevents root applications from connecting

[Jeremy Bicha]

It has been widely publicized at least since Fedora 25's release a year
ago that GNOME on Wayland does not support running GUI apps as root. It
has long been best practice for apps to not do this. Instead of trying
to implement clever workarounds, app developers should follow best
practice here.

Would you like to submit a patch for sudo? The GDM maintainer Ray Strode
rightfully believes that it is wrong (i.e. Won't Fix) to have XWayland
support running apps as root as long as Wayland does not. Therefore,
someone will need to have a proposed fix for that issue first before
worrying about XWayland.

At this point, I don't believe that Ubuntu intends to diverge from
upstream on this issue, so to some extent, Won't Fix is appropriate here
too. So fix things upstream instead of complaining to Debian and Ubuntu.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1652282

Title:
  Xwayland not using XAUTHORITY, prevents root applications from
  connecting

Status in gdm:
  Confirmed
Status in GParted:
  Fix Released
Status in Ubuntu GNOME:
  Invalid
Status in gdm3 package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in gparted package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  When running wayland, GDM fails to set up an XAUTHORITY file and instead
  relies on the process UID for authentication.  This prevents
  applications run as root, like gparted or synaptic from connecting to
  the server.  GDM needs to set up the XAUTHORITY file when running
  Xwayland just like it does when it runs the conventional Xorg.

  A large list of applications broken by this can be found here:

  https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=Exec%3Dsu-to-
  root+filetype%3Adesktop+path%3A*%2Fapplications%2F*&perpkg=1

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