Re: running Gnome apps on an ssh session

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Kenny asked:

> Hi.  Is this documented in bug reports?  If not, what packages need bug
> reports filed against them?
>  
I've filed RFEs 164941 for bonobo-activation (remote activation) and 
164942 for at-spi (remote application communication with 
at-spi-registryd).  The two are inter-related.

There are some interesting questions raised here, and it's not entirely 
obvious what the best approach is.  We could, for instance, move away 
from bonobo-activation for the registry, and use an X-display-based 
technique such as stringifying the IOR in an X atom in order to locate 
the appropriate at-spi-registryd instance.  This would turn our 
per-user/host AT-SPI registry into a per-DISPLAY registration - however 
there may be some security implications in doing so. 

The issue of what to do about applications sharing the same display, but 
owned by different users, is even trickier, and arises when, for 
instance, a user runs an application which needs root privilege, such as 
the set-date-and-time utility.  Some such applications run the GUI as 
root too, which prevents them from connecting with the user's at-spi 
registry.  In general, one doesn't want other users to have access to 
one another's accessibility APIs because it violates the usual 
user-based security model - particular when they may be running as root.

Bill

>          Kenny
>  



> On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 06:42:45PM +0000, Bill Haneman wrote:
>  
>
> > Hi Kenny:
> >
> > Accessibility for remote GNOME apps is still on the roadmap.  Because 
> > the accessibility framework uses CORBA, it works in theory, but in 
> > practice, the bonobo-activation mechanism which GNOME uses to register 
> > with the at-spi registry is tied to localhost.  So the missing link is a 
> > remote bonobo-activation; once you have that, the rest should fall into 
> > place.
> >
> > So it's a known issue that this doesn't work yet, but making it work, 
> > though it will require some new code, should not be a big effort.
> >
> > Here are some technical details:
> >
> > 1) applications load an accessibility bridge at startup, and register 
> > with the accessibility registry (at-spi-registryd) via 
> > bonobo-activation.  Due to current limitations in bonobo-activation, 
> > this registry is per-user-host, not per-display.
> >
> > 2) the 'application instance' which is reported to the registry is 
> > network-transparent, i.e. it could be local or remote.  Once the 
> > registry, or an assistive technology, receives a reference to a remote 
> > application, it can communicate with it just as though it were local 
> > (though possibly more slowly).
> >
> >
> > - Bill
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
> >    
>
>
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> End of gnome-accessibility-list Digest, Vol 9, Issue 7
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