Re: Proposed modules: my consensus so far

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 14:43 +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

>  1) I think a better way of implementing this type of stuff is for 
>     gnome-system-monitor to have two modes - an admin mode and a user 
>     mode. You might have two binaries and .desktop files, one marked as 
>     "this needs to be run as root", or you might just have it so if you
>     decide not to enter the root password it runs in user mode.

That sounds grotesque and complicated.  The idea of using a backend
process for this sounds a lot nicer, as someone else mentioned.  The
frontend always, always runs as the user (which also means it always
keeps the user settings, theme, etc) and any admin-tasks are done
through a backend process that can run as either the user or root.  User
clicks an Authenticate button to kill the current backend process and
restart it as root.  The API for killing and restarting the backend
should be as abstract as possible so that the implementation can
replaced with no change to apps to support gnomesu, console-helper,
whatever.

Perhaps gnome-system-tools already has a component that can be used for
this?  (It's been a while since I used gst last...)