Re: Porposing libgnomesu for 2.10

[Carlos Garnacho <carlosg gnome org>]

Hi!,

On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 19:20 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> Il giorno gio, 28-10-2004 alle 12:37 +0200, Hongli Lai ha scritto:
> > I'm the maintainer of libgnomesu and I would like to propose it for 
> > inclusion in 2.10.
> > libgnomesu is a library which allows applications to run programs as 
> > another user or root. Think 'su' with graphical user interface. More 
> > info here: http://members1.chello.nl/~h.lai/libgnomesu/
> > It's in GNOME CVS, module libgnomesu. Also, Benoit Dejean, maintainer of 
> > GNOME System Monitor, is interested in using libgnomesu.
> 
> It could be useful for GNOME System Tool and GNOME Log viewer too.

Regarding to the GNOME System tools, I'd indeed like to remove the "su"
calling from its code, and libgnomesu would be a good option, but I'd
personally prefer to give the next step and making GNOME support and
adopt a new method for authentication (call it pam_timestamp or
whatever) regardless of the distro it's being run on.

With this issue I made some proposals to xdg-list, but didn't seem to
create much interest, my main argument is that modern desktops (where
"admin" tasks are somewhat usual) can't keep wrapping authentication
tools that are >20 years old. Of course I'm still working on this, I
think I have a better structure in mind than what I proposed/implemented

And regarding to GNOME log viewer, AFAICT most distros have an adm group
for letting users look logs, so I'd vote for this approach if it's
feasible

	Just my 2¢, cheers!

> 
> And of course any application that needs to run with root privileges,
> such as distro configuration tools, so IMHO it's a good addition for the
> GNOME-is-a-platform prospective,
> 
> The pam backend is the RIGHT idea.
> 
> > I'm not sure if it should go into the desktop platform or developer 
> > platform. I'm thinking about desktop platform. Any comments/suggestions 
> > regarding this?
> 
> == String and UI == 
> 
> s/superuser/administrator (or whatever suggested by GNOME style guide)
> 
> Review dialog to make HIG-compliant:
>       * Use the GTK-DIALOG-AUTHENTICATION stock icon in dialogs, as
>         suggested in HIG -> Alerts
>       * Maybe change the Run button to OK
>       * remove the "verifying password" and use mouse_wait
> 
> == Bug fixing ==
> 
> Compilation fails on su-backend/su.c, Mandrake 10.1 Community, here the
> log
> 
> In file included from system.h:218,
>                  from su.c:68:
> sys2.h:139: error: conflicting types for 'malloc'
> sys2.h:139: error: conflicting types for 'malloc'
> sys2.h:143: error: conflicting types for 'memchr'
> /usr/include/string.h:66: error: previous declaration of 'memchr' was
> here
> sys2.h:143: error: conflicting types for 'memchr'
> /usr/include/string.h:66: error: previous declaration of 'memchr' was
> here
> sys2.h:147: error: conflicting types for 'realloc'
> /usr/include/stdlib.h:567: error: previous declaration of 'realloc' was
> here
> sys2.h:147: error: conflicting types for 'realloc'
> /usr/include/stdlib.h:567: error: previous declaration of 'realloc' was
> here
> make[1]: *** [su.o] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/GNOME/libgnomesu/su-backend'
> make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1
> 
>