How to pick up crash reports owned by system users?

[Ian Jackson]

Martin Pitt writes ("How to pick up crash reports owned by system users?"):
>  * Change apport-checkreports to check for the existence of system
>    crash reports if the user is in 'admin', and have apport-gtk gksu
>    itself if there is a system crash report it cannot read. This would
>    be the safe option, but requires some ugly hardcoding of group
>    names and semantics into apport. However, this hardcoding could
>    eventually be moved into the update-notifier apport code (when
>    we'll finally get event-notifier, this will be much cleaner).

This definitely seems better, but I don't understand why it involves
ugly hardcoding of group names.  Do we not have a standard way for
programs to tell whether the user is admin (ie, whether it's sensible
to run gksu) ?

I thought that this would already exist and be used eg to hide
non-functional menu entries from non-admin users.

Ian.