su(1) for gnome...

[Peter Hawkins <peter hawkins emu id au>]

Hi...

With respect to gnome-utils/mini-utils/gsu ... I noticed recently that Stormix have a gtksu in their distribution which we may be able to snaffle instead. It's not amazingly portable, (needs a getpt() call, but that could be replaced with gnome pty helper)... but possibly worth looking at.

Their implementation works by opening a pseudo terminal and dup2()ing that file descriptor into stdin, forking and execing su(1), and writing the password into it. It has the advantage that it is _very_ simple, not much that could go wrong, assuming su(1) behaves as expected. It also doesn't require a patched su.

There's no license on the file, but everything else stormix do appears to be GPLed.

ftp://ftp.stormix.com/pub/storm/dists/hail/main/source/x11/gtksu_1.5.tar.gz

Worth doing?

=)
Peter