su for dummies

[Jonas De Vuyst <jonas devuyst advalvas be>]

Hello,

I wonder what will be the plan in Gnome 1.4 (or Gnome 2.0) for getting
root priviliges. Right now I seem to have the options of logging in as
root and opening a gnome-terminal, typing su and executing the program.

Logging in as root is something I'd rather not advice to friends coming
from Windows. It is insecure and applications as gmc, Nautilus and
[x]chat keep reminding you of that (rightfully so).

Explaining the gnome-terminal way is quite embarrasing too. We've got
beautiful software like Nautilus, Evolution and Red Carpet but can't
accomplish a simple thing as getting root priviliges.

Obiously we need a "become root" dialog!

The KDE way of doing this would be to have menu items choose the user as
which the programs should run. This would be an easy fix and Good Enough
for most applications, so perhaps this should be done even if my next
suggestion was implemented.

As a lot of the applications that need root (or any other users)
priviliges can also work without them it might be nice to provide an API
for this. Say I was running Nautilus and I wanted to enter /root/, a
dialog box could come up and ask me to enter the root password or
cancel. Another example would be gmenu, if I wanted to edit the
system-wide menus then I shoud be able to do this by hitting an "unlock"
button. One more example, it would be nice if I could run Red Carpet as
a normal user, see if there were any updates and if so ask me for a
password if I wanted to install them.

Of course I'm assuming here that you haven't already thought of this.

- Jonas