Re: GNOME System Monitor will use libgnomesu

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi,

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 15:21 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> 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). 

	As I said in the thread, there is nothing fundamentally Red Hat/Fedora
specific about usermode. There's also nothing about usermode that would
prevent it from being a part of GNOME. Why we never realised before, I
don't know.

	Anyway, Nalin and Jindrich (the maintainers), have no problem moving
usermode upstream to GNOME. I said I'd take a look at doing what needs
to be done and I've been doing that whenever I could, but it isn't
entirely straightforward.

	But anyway, my objections about libgnomesu shouldn't be interpreted as
"we should be using usermode", but rather "we should be using something
*like* usermode". The implications for the user interface as a result of
using something like libgnomesu is what worries me most.

Cheers,
Mark.