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

[Daniel van Vugt]

I'm only recently familiar with the Mutter design, but...

Mutter is the graphics platform on which gnome-shell is built. Mutter
supports running under a Xorg server, or none at all on bare metal
(Wayland mode). So in order to provide a seamless consistent interface
in the latter case it spawns Xwayland, which allows X apps to work with
Wayland even when Mutter's not running on Xorg. In this way, any shell
built on Mutter has the option to use Xorg or Wayland, and if using
Wayland can still transparently run X apps.

"Clutter" is the graphics toolkit on which Mutter is built. "Cogl" is
the graphics toolkit on which Clutter is built. Cogl uses OpenGL
directly. Yes, that's probably too many layers but that's how things
evolved.

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

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

Status in gdm:
  Expired
Status in GParted:
  Fix Released
Status in Ubuntu GNOME:
  Invalid
Status in gdm3 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in gnome-shell package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in gparted package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in mutter package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

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

  openSUSE handles this issue with this patch (from the changelog, it looks like they implemented this for their YaST settings app):
  https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/GNOME:Factory/mutter/mutter-xwayland-create-xauthority.patch?expand=1

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