Re: [gedit-list] Request: ask for adminpass when saving readonly files

[Steve Frécinaux <nudrema gmail com>]

On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 11:22 +0100, Paolo Maggi wrote:
> Hi,
> 	
> > When a user opens a file for which he does not have sufficient 
> > privileges, the file opens as read-only.
> > 
> > Would it be possible to make gedit open a dialogue where the user can 
> > type the login and password, when he begins to edit that readonly 
> > file or when he uses the Save command to save the file.

This looks very important to me. Basically, people don't understand how
to edit a file as root (actually, it's very hard to do). This is an
obvious usability issue.

> Asking a password to escalate privileges in a secure way is a problem
> that still need to be solved at gnome level.
> We can think to implement such a feature when the problem will be solved
> in a "official" way in the gnome libs.

I thought about an intermediate solution. Tell me what you think of it.

The idea is to have a "proxy" saver program. It would just be a very
simple program that would just save the file, nothing else. It would be
spawned using gksu(do), and communicate with the main gedit program
using an ad-hoc protocol.

This looks quite hackish but IMHO it could work, and solve a common
issue in gedit, making it much more useful and less frustrating to use.