Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 17:04, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 12Nov2001 03:11PM (-0800), Adam Elman wrote:
> > 
> > MacOS X has an interesting approach to this: a little lock icon is 
> > showed on any dialog which requires admin access.  If you want to change 
> > settings, you first have to click the lock icon and enter the root 
> > password; it then enables the controls.  I think it's somehow using sudo 
> > underneath, but I'm not sure.
> 
> This was a discussion topic on some GNOME list recently. I can't find
> a link in the archives right now, but in brief, it's not using sudo,
> and it doesn't necessarily require the root password (just the
> password of a user in the admin group).
> 
> I think it's a fairly good design and could probably be implemented on
> top of PAM by someone with enough time.

<crack>

HURD's approach to this is so much smarter. You acquire tokens to gain
various levels of permission. It would be so much easier if programs
could gain the "root" token temporarily rather than having to spawn new
processes running as root. *sigh*

</crack>

-Seth