April 13, 2010 Meeting Logs

[Bill Cox]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Francesco Fumanti
<francesco.fumanti at gmx.net> wrote:
> Due to incompatibility of at-spi with gksu, I wonder whether it would make sense to create a goal for lucid+1 to eliminate gksu from the distribution. This would at least remove part of the bugs caused by at-spi until at-spi2 takes over. For example, when starting the Synaptic Package Manager from the Administration menu while an application is actively using at-spi, the desktop becomes unresponsive. Some weeks ago, I started a thread about it on the devel discussion list:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2010-March/010770.html

In general, I think it is difficult to properly maintain both gksu and
sudo independently.  It's hard enough to keep sudo working with Orca,
and gksu has not worked with Orca since I've been involved.  My
preference, not just for accessibility, but also for security, is to
just have sudo, and make gksu a simple GDK wrapper for sudo.  For
Vinux, I wrote a simple wrapper script using zenity to replace gksu,
and it seems to be working well.  However, it's not good enough for
distributions for sighted users.  I was thinking of trying to write a
better sudo wrapper in Python, so we could support all of the gksu
options.  I also looked into the gksu source code, but I have to admit
getting frustrated at the complexity, and ending up thinking gksu
should have stayed as a simple wrapper.

Bill