Matthew Saltzman wrote:
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Jeff Vian wrote:
To me it is just one more piece of evidence
that whoever wrote this program did not think carefully enough
about what precisely the program is meant to do.
They did think carefully. The present usage handles probably at least
99+% of all cases.
Do you mean that system-config-printer sets up a printer correctly
in > 99% of cases?
Where do you get your figures from?
I have what I take to be a pretty standard system -
printer attached to the parallel port on my desktop,
and accessed from various laptops and other computers -
and none of the printer wizards has _ever_ worked for me
on any machine except the desktop itself.
I have the same setup and system-config-printer works fine for me. (I
use lpd to print from my Windows machines, though).
So from the sample so far, system-config-printer works fine for at least
50% of such basic setups 8^).
The CUPS web interface on port 631 always works,
although the documentation is not very good, IMHO.
Even the Windows XP wizard works reasonably well.
The present config ensures that anyone running these programs (with
default paths/permissions) has root authority, and makes sure that the
program itself does not have to be SUID root. SUID root was the earlier
configuration, and is a security risk.
That seems perfectly sensible to me.
But I don't see why it requires you to have two different programs
with the same name.
I don't really get this either. All of the system-config utilities in
/usr/bin are symlinked to consolehelper. Many have no /usr/sbin
counterpart. Yet they seem to start just fine when invoked as root.
My guess is that the /usr/sbin ones are artifacts of a pre-consolehelper
era and could be removed with no ill effects.
You guess wrong. That would cause them to stop working. Consolehelper is
not some super-configuration utility replacing all of the
system-config-* programs, it's just a simple wrapper that prompts for
the root password, switches to root (assuming the passwird was correct)
and runs the requested program from /usr/sbin.
Paul.
