Re: Proposed modules: my consensus so far

[Carlos Garnacho <carlosg gnome org>]

Hi Murray :),

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 18:08 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > Le mardi 23 novembre 2004 à 13:09 +0100, Hongli Lai a écrit :
> >> Murray Cumming wrote:
> >> > libgnomesu:
> >> >   Not until a Desktop modules uses it, or says that they want to use
> >> it.
> >>
> >> As I've written in my earlier email, the GNOME System Monitor maintainer
> >> (Benoit Dejean) wants to use it.
> 
> So, you can probably use it. That's a fairly good rule, as long as it's
> followed responsibly.
> 
> I haven't followed this in detail. Did any other Desktop maintainer have a
> strong objection to it? Did any of them say that it couldn't ever do
> something that it should do. Or did any of them say that there was a
> better candidate? If not then I can't see any reason why we would reject
> it.

As the maintainer of one of the modules that would use it, I've got to
say that libgnomesu as is would bring GST little advantages, I'll
explain as widely as I can:

Right now the GST supports local and remote configuration (the latter is
somewhat hackish, but I'd love to improve it with some time), both
methods use almost the same code, so using libgnomesu would only mean
removing  <100 LOC from GST code if I want to keep remote config by
myself.

But I'd almost gladly do this if libgnomesu brought clear advantages
such as a more intelligent user authentication method than using su (I
read somewhere that it can use too consolehelper from redhat, but that's
not as distro-wide as I'd like)

I also did some efforts [1][2] that were targetted to the same direction
than libgnomesu (providing an auth API, but with the possibility of
remembering that user A can do B in a gui-friendly way), but the project
didn't get more than some noise in xdg-list.

So I'd even dare to propose to somehow merge both projects, even if the
custom setuid program compilation is optional, but I'd love to get rid
of "su" calls in gui applications :)

Of course, if the module is finally accepted, GST won't refuse to use
it.

	Regards


[1] http://www.gnome.org/~carlosg/stuff/system-auth-agent/
[2] http://www.gnome.org/~carlosg/stuff/gnome-auth/

> 
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc murrayc com
> www.murrayc.com
> www.openismus.com
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