Goal proposal: Replace gksu because incompatible to at-spi

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hi,


As you might probably know, gksu is not compatible to at-spi. [1]

Consequently, I wonder whether it can be possible to create an Ubuntu 10.10 goal (for Ubuntu 10.04 it might be to late) that aims to completely remove gksu from Ubuntu and replacing it by something else.

GNOME has decided to remove bonobo from their desktop and once that is done, at-spi will be replaced with at-spi2.
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation

Thus gksu will not be incompatible anymore to the accessibility framework, but can the fact that GNOME is getting rid of bonobo not also be a reason to remove gksu from Ubuntu? (When I say this, I am assuming that gksu depends on bonobo, but in reality, I don't know whether that is really the case. Please, anybody correct me if I am wrong.)


I hoped that gksu-polkit could be a candidate for the replacement of gksu; so I edited the menu item that launches synaptic and replaced gksu with gksu-polkit.

Unfortunately, version 0.0.1-1 of gksu-polkit that is shipping in the lucid universe repository does not even show the authentification dialog. However, the situation gets better with version 0.0.2-1 that I downloaded from debian:
http://packages.debian.org/sid/libgksu-polkit0
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gksu-polkit
It shows the authentification dialog, allows me to start synaptic with root privileges without the desktop becoming unresponsive; synaptic also seems fully fontional, but the gksu-polkit process takes cpu; a kill -9 is necessary to terminate the process.

Here is the bug that I filed about the issue; maybe somebody with more knowledge can improve the bug thread.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=572333


Maybe the gksu-polkit is not the best approach to remove gksu from Ubuntu; there might be a better way to do it.(I don't know; I am not a real developer.)  

The real aim of this email is to raise the question about whether it makes sense for Ubuntu to completely remove gksu from the system; if so, to start the discussion about how it could be done and to have this point considered at least as a goal for Ubuntu 10.10.


Cheers,

Francesco.


[1] How to verify the incompatibility:
  - Enable at-spi by putting a checkmark in the Enable assistive technologies setting of the System->Preferences->Assistive Technologies control panel.
  - Enable an assistive tool that uses at-spi; for example, enable the simulated secondary click in the Accessibility tab of the mouse control panel. (System->Preferences->Mouse)
  - Try to start the Synaptic Package Manager by using the corresponding menu item in System->Administration.The desktop becomes partially unresponsive because this menu item is configured to use gksu that is not compatible to at-spi. (You can switch to a virtual terminal (f.ex.:ctrl+lt+f1) and kill the gksu process to make the desktop responsive again.)