Re: [Usability]Re: The path to 2.4 -- part 1

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I would definitely be strongly in favour of having this feature
implemented. System administration is a place where GNOME still falls
flat on its ass, dropping you straight to the command line... and the
core of system administration in Linux right now is file management +
text editor.

On the flip side... this is a very difficult feature to do well. AFAIK
it will require spawning a slave process as root that either pipes lots
of data to the user-mode Nautilus or displays a progress dialogue
directly (possibly good for security reasons? but would have the root
GTK theme and stuff which would be weird). In either case, it means a
fair amount of hacking and extension to the way Nautilus' file transfer
stuff currently works.... And you still have problems if, for example,
you want to enter directories that are not readable by "normal users".

-Seth

On Mon, 2003-02-10 at 15:27, Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote:
> Nautilus definitely needs to be of primary concern for 2.4... there was
> an interesting suggestion I read in a RH8 evaluation essay that was
> actually linked to off of here... we're getting better at allowing more
> system administration functions to occur from normal user accounts by
> prompting for a root password... this author suggested that when doing
> file management function from within Nautilus, if an operation requires
> permissions that the user does not have, then prompt for the root
> password... e.g., if I want to copy a file to /usr/bin and I'm not
> logged in as root, simply prompt for the root password... or if I want
> to view another user's home directory but I don't have permissions,
> simply prompt for the root password...
> 
> Comments?
> 
> -jag
> 
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Joshua Adam Ginsberg	       Cellphone: 970.749.8530
> Rice University '02	       Email: joshg myrealbox com
> St. Mark's School of Texas '98
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