Objections [Was: GNOME System Monitor will use libgnomesu]

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Hongli Lai">

> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> >	As I said in the thread, there is nothing fundamentally Red Hat/Fedora
> >specific about usermode.
> 
> As as I said: the fact is, usermode/consolehelper is only available in a
> handful of distributions.
> 
> >	Anyway, Nalin and Jindrich (the maintainers), have no problem moving
> >usermode upstream to GNOME.
> 
> Great, go ahead. But I'm not holding my breath. People have been
> discussing this kind of things for YEARS, and nothing happened.  Until the
> day usermode (or something similar to usermode) has been moved upstream,
> libgnomesu will be there to fill the gap.

Unfortunately, it *doesn't* fill the gap. The sudo support has just been
removed, so libgnomesu will not be usable on Ubuntu (and other sudo based)
systems. We'll have to continue using our patches for various modules,
including procman.

I don't think it's worth adding a controversial dependency for a few
features in procman that, to be frank, could easily wait until we had a
better system in place. libgnomesu is not being used by any other module,
and there are stated objections to it. Importantly, there has been very
little (if any) use case based design leading up to libgnomesu's proposal,
and this is an area of growing importance (particularly if we get started on
a top-down redesign of the control center).

So, my personal feeling is that adding libgnomesu to the Desktop release is
inappropriate at this stage (for design reasons, but also because there's
only one module using it at this stage), and that procman should only
optionally depend on it, if at all. Sorry.

- Jeff

-- 
GUADEC 2005: Stuttgart, Germany                      http://2005.guadec.org/
 
   "Can we have a special TELSABUG category, and everything gets dropped
                     to fix them first?" - Telsa Gwynne