Re: su/sudo wrapper

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 15:50 +0200, Beno�Dejean wrote:
> I can't imagine what would be
> the purpose of gst if it was not able to do stuff with privileges.

Oh, I think that's understating gnome-system-monitor; personally I find
it very useful even when running unprivileged (looking at memory sizes,
security contexts etc.). And if I need to peek or poke at stuff I right
now use sudo and run it as root. Not exactly optimal.

> I'am also concerned about consistency and integration : we have one
> filedialog, so lets have one password prompt for superuser actions. 

That's the plan; I have a PolicyKit-gnome project that provides this
dialog. Right now it's through a D-Bus session interface; that might
change depending... I will import that code into GNOME SVN soon. I've
got a patch for gnome-mount to use it already.

> And
> maybe it could be integrated within gnome-keyring, i don't know.

PolicyKit and gnome-keyring are conceptually two very different
things... I'd say all they have in common is that both prompt for
passwords :-)

But, yeah, you're still right in a way: all password prompting dialogs
should feel and act the same way. In the future that will become more
important when XACE [1] (formerly known as SEX [2]) becomes a reality.
Then we want the WM to honor labels on the window and possibly draw a
password dialog with different decorations. It will also be useful
insofar that only trusted X clients (like the screen reader and on
screen keyboards) can peek/poke that window. Also, you may want to apply
bling-bling effects, using COMPOSITE, like fading the screen to black
when a password dialog is focused. Things like that. But now I digress.

     David

[1] : http://people.freedesktop.org/~ewalsh/xace_proposal.html

[2] : Security Enhanced X