Re: GNOME System Monitor will use libgnomesu

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 13:58:49 +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	Back in November we had a very long discussion about the proposal to
> add libgnomesu in 2.10. I don't think we ever came to a consensus that
> it should be added ...

>From rereading the thread it seems that there were better ways of doing
the UI than by asking the user for the root password "just in time",
however most of them relied on things like consolehelper/usermode to be
set up and so far this seems to be a Fedora/Red Hat only feature.

There really does need to be a better way of dealing with this type of
authentication problem but it seems to be one of those issues that doesn't
fit neatly into any one projects area of responsibility and falls through
the cracks as a result (eg, consolehelper hasn't been pushed upstream as a
system-neutral authentication system AFAICT). 

It might be worth just pushing the method/UI MacOS X seems to use with
simple backends run via sudo that communicate with the GUI via RPC, and
actually people already seem keen on that if you look at things like the
Nautilus/Samba integration code that was posted to nautilus-list the other
day.

I would expect Red Hat to patch this out in favour of consolehelper as
that's the preferred system there (if they haven't already) but for people
who don't have that technology libgnomesu seems to be a practical solution
that works well enough today. I don't think anybody is saying it should go
in the developer platform so if it's decided later this is the wrong way
to do it AND a better alternative is available, then it can always change
then.

thanks -mike