Re: [orca-list] Upgrading pkexec to run X11 Orca-accessible applications as root.

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 06:42:39AM EST, Bill Cox wrote:
> gksu has problems.  It's no longer a simple sudo wrapper, and has
> evolved into a multi-threaded monster of such complexity that good C
> debuggers (I count myself as one) can't easily fix major problems.
> gksu has a many-year outstanding bug where it hangs Gnome if
> at-spi-registryd is running.  I've spent hours trying to find the bug,
> as have others.  If gksu is so complex that we can't debug it, how can
> we trust it?  This is very likely a security risk vs just using
> pkexec.  If we already have sudo and pkexec, why do we need gksu?  Why
> maintain and trust all three?

> From what I remember reading in a bug on GNOME bugzilla, gksu lacks a mainloop which is a contributor to the 
> issues that we have with accessibility.

There is also gksu-polkit, which at a glance, does the same thing, using policykit, and is already in Ubuntu 
universe, and likely Debian as well. My vote is that we should try gksu-polkit and see whether things are 
better or worse, using it as a gksu replacement.

Luke