Todd Zullinger wrote:
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Todd Zullinger wrote:
[...]
I think you'd have to admit that using consolehelper to start up
various programs -- somewhat random depending on the user's
needs/wants -- is a pain in the ass.
It's not what consolehelper is designed to do. It is meant for
*applications*. Not directly by end users.
Agreed. And that makes it the wrong solution for the task Bill was
asking about.
If you are fiddling with zenity, you might be building a mini
application. If it was just a direct attempt to launch a application,
consolehelper isnt the answer.
There is a view point that su helpers are a wrong model.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/portland/2006-April/000384.html
I don't disagree that a better method than su helpers would be ideal
for desktop and gui users. The problem is that those methods don't
exist yet and there are more than a few users who would like to do
things that require root privileges using some sort of gui.
In that thread itself, there are descriptions about PolicyKit which is
about to be integrated.
Since Fedora has disabled fast user switching in gnome (which I
completely understand, as it makes for some interesting permissions
issues), this leaves those users with the alternative of starting a
terminal and running sudo appname or logging out as a user and logging
in as root. Neither of which are as nice as it'd be to be able to
create a launcher that did this.
See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/FastUserSwitching
I'd say that in the interim until su helpers aren't needed something
like gksu would be an improvement to many users.
That kind of thinking taken a bit to next level results in sloppy
security. Who is thinking that running the usual GNOME and KDE
applications under root privelages is a good idea. There is massive
amount of code which is unaudited.
Oh man, now I have to get my flame retardant suit on in case that
starts a KDE versus Gnome knock-down-drag-out battle. ;-)
But it does point out that such a su helper is shipped with KDE so
including one for Gnome wouldn't be so wrong.
We could fix that but folks would bring out conspiracy theories about
mutating it. .
Rahul
