Re: remote thumbnailing: authentication issues

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 17:46 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> When thumbnailing remote files that are accessed through a ssh
> connection, nautilus passes the file URIs
> ("ssh://foo bar org/foobar/foo.pdf") to the thumbnailers. The resulting
> problem is that thumbnailing requires authentication through the keyring
> mechanism, since the thumbnailer is considered a new application, or -
> if the thumbnailer doesn't init the gnome authentication manager - the
> file isn't thumbnailed at all.
> This does not affect image thumbnails, since they're generated
> in-process (cf. libnautlius-private/nautilus-thumbnails.[ch]).
> 
> ideas
> =====
> 
> - add gnome_authentication_manager to all thumbnailers
>  - thumbnailing will work
>  - the user is asked for a password for "evince-thumbnailer",
> "totem-video-thumbnailer", "foo-thumbnailer"

If you store the password on the keyring it'll only ask once per
thumbnailer though (to add that app to the keyring ACL). However, you
often don't want to store e.g. a ssh password in the keyring. (although
in the case of ssh you likely want to use ssh-agent anyway.)

> - use some internal plugin mechanism

We made plugins external to avoid lots of stability and bloat problem.
You don't want to link in various pdf renderers, postscript parsers,
video codecs etc into Nautilus. They can way to easily crash, hang or
otherwise affect stuff.

> - tell the authentication manager to consider the thumbnailers child
> processes
>   - does this work at all?
>   - will the thumbnailer consider child process as belonging to the
> "nautilus" authentication?

There is not really a way to do this.

> any suggestions?

No really good ones :/

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a benighted small-town paranormal investigator on the run. She's a 
mentally unstable belly-dancing lawyer with a birthmark shaped like Liberty's 
torch. They fight crime!