April 13, 2010 Meeting Logs

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

Il 14/04/2010 21:52, Bill Cox ha scritto:
> 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.

That would be great; maybe even better than using gksu-polkit, something that I tried a few weeks ago.

>  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.

As far as I understand, the ideal solution at least from the point of view of a mouse only user, would probably be to enhance the applications that need root privileges to directly use policykit to get root privileges when they needed it. (instead of running as root all the time through gksu)

At some point, I hoped to be able to replace gksu with gksu-polkit (as a workaround by replacing gksu with gksu-polkit in the desktop file of the Synaptic Package Manager, Gparted,...); but unfortunately, gksu-polkit is not working properly in Ubuntu. What do you think about gksu-polkit?

Cheers

Francesco