Re: http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/fosdem2003/file-selector.html

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux <charles reptile ca>]

Hello,

On Mon, 2003-04-21 at 09:19, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-04-20 at 02:30, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:

[...]

> >     http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/fosdem2003/file-selector.html
> > 
> > And, I thought I'd throw in some more things you might want to
> > consider.

[...]

> >     (2) Being able to open a file (or whatever) as another user
> >         would be useful.  For example, if I want to edit a file
> >         owned by someone else, it would be useful if I could
> >         tell the UI, "open this file as user X"... and the
> >         GtkFileChooser would popup a "password box" or something
> >         like that.
> 
> Sounds sort of neat. No clue at all how it could possibly be
> implemented. It's basically outside the scope of this project.
>
> A backend that encapsulated file operations (that's not
> part of the file selector) could ask for a password on an
> attempt to access a file without read permissions ... that's
> basically the same thing as asking for a password for 
> remote access ... but  tracking those permissions in order to 
> be able to save the file again sounds impractical to me.

If using GnomeVFS, as the file system abstraction layer, then
the ability to open a local file as another user could be
easily built into it.  (Maybe by making a new uri type.
Make something like "su://root:password@/etc/hosts" or
"su://george:mypassword@/home/george/one/of/georges/files".
As opposed to using the "file" uri.)

The main thing is, though, for the widget to know when
to open a file as another user.

One way to implement this (from the UI point of view) would be
to popup a context window, when the user right clicks on
a file (in the GtkFileChooser).  In this popup menu, there could
be a choice that says: "Open as Another User".  (There will be
other choices in this pop up menu, of course,)  And when the
user clicks this, another window pops up, that will get the
username and password.

Also, in addition to this.  There could be a check box, on
the GtkFileChooser, that might say something like "Open
as Another User".  And if the user "checks" this, then when
the user clicks the OK button, to open the file, a window will
pop up, to get the username and password.


See ya

-- 
     Charles Iliya Krempeaux, BSc
     charles reptile ca

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