Re: Proposed modules: my consensus so far

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi Hongli,

On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 19:56 +0100, Hongli Lai wrote:
> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > 	It could be as simple as just making the "Kill process" menu item
> > insensitive if you're not running as root and you select a process that
> > isn't owned by you ...
> 
> I think asking password every time is better than either of these:
> - Not be able to do it at all.
> - Having to open a console, then type 'su -c gnome-system-monitor'

	Yes, of course, if it actually figures on the list of user tasks,
yadda, yadda, yadda (and I think it does)

	The point is, that rather littering a UI unpredictably with password
dialogs it may be better to give the tool an "admin mode" and a "user
mode". In admin mode, you can kill anyone's processes and in user mode
you can only kill your own.

	What I'm getting at is that, in this case, it appears to me a "this
program should prompt for the root password at startup" interface works
out better than a "run this program as root" API[1].

Cheers,
Mark.

[1] - I've probably lost a lot of people here, so:

 + libgnomesu has an API like this

    gboolean gnomesu_exec (gchar *commandline);

 + usermode has an interface where an app installs itself such that 
   if a non-root user launches the program, they get asked for the
   root password

	I'm trying to figure out which we actually need.