Re: Using gconf in setuid program?

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Jun 29, 2005, at 3:42 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-06-28 at 19:59 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
>
>
> > Well, ideally the setuid program wants to see exactly the same  
> > settings
> > as the user sees (e.g. mandatory > per-user > defaults) to enforce  
> > the
> > same policy as the rest of the bits using these keys.
>
>     Ah, I presumed you wanted the mount helper to implement some
> system-wide policy which you didn't want the user to be able  
> influence.

Well, I just want it to see the same setting as the rest of the  
desktop. This setting is system-wide and mandatory (or site-wide  
depending on your gconf backend choice, right?) only if the setting  
is in /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory. In the event it isn't it's a  
user setting.

So, I want to support both scenarios.

(specifically, for the mount application I'm looking at both actually  
makes sense - in a typical "home user" install the key  
can_mount_internal_hard_drives is set to FALSE but can be modified by  
any user (it's FALSE because we may wrongly detect internal ataraid  
drives as data partitions - bad), however in an, say, in a typical  
"kiosk" or "enterprise" install the sysadm want to lock this or  
another setting (such as can_mount_external_drives_rw) down.

>     In that case, then, you it not make sense for gnome-mount to  
> just read
> the policy from GConf and pass it to the helper via the command  
> line or
> environment?

But this would break for mandatory settings because the setuid helper  
cannot really trust gnome-mount (or anyone else invoking the the  
setuid helper). So the setuid helper really needs to check this himself.

Cheers,
David