April 13, 2010 Meeting Logs (forgot links)

[Bill Cox]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Francesco Fumanti
<francesco.fumanti at gmx.net> wrote:
> 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?

Initially, I just replaced calls to gksu with calls to a simple sudo
wrapper script, which I called runsu.  However, there are multiple
tools in the system that call gksu directly, and I found I got better
results by replacing gksu with the wrapper script around sudo.  For
example, Ubiquity, the Ubuntu installer, crashes about half the time
for blind users, because /usr/bin/ubiquity calls gksu to launch the
real application, or at least it did in Beta 1.

I agree that policy kit in theory is a superior solution, if it works
with Orca, but for all the legacy apps that don't yet use it, I prefer
a sudo wrapper to gksu.  The other choice is to just fix gksu, but I
don't understand why we've got such a complex tool that in the end
should just be calling sudo.

If there is any realistic interest in a Python wrapper around sudo to
replace gksu, I'll bump up it's priority on my to-do list.

Bill