On 30/07/07, Jason Chu <jason@archlinux.org> wrote:
Yeah, but the question is when will we implement another script that does the same sort of thing for (say) setting the desktop background?
I'm new to this business so, with the upmost respect: This is solution to an actual problem that exist _right now_ (tm). I don't think we're in any danger of accidently setting a precedent by going with any solution. We all know the fluidity of the situation and I think we know to base decisions on current circumstances.
If we just keep implementing similar scripts for the user to choose between equivalent alternatives, why don't we look at what other people are doing to solve the problem?
My Fedora contact told me about consolehelper which they use now and PolicyKit which they plan on moving to next release. PolicyKit actually looks pretty cool, even with desktop integration (using dbus, sorry Aaron). Gnome will be moving to PolicyKit soon. Hopefully KDE will follow.
PolicyKit is also an fd.o project, so it's pretty mainstream.
I'm not the smartest guy in the room but this looks to me like a new sudo/gksu/run as root auth system, rather than something to manage the multitude of existing run as root auth systems. It also looks like applications have to be built with support for it.
There aren't really any easy solutions to this. It's a tough problem that no one has solved generally.
Well, Ubuntu solved it by setting a standard. They use sudo, so I guess that they use sudo in all their .desktop files. We could do the same. We could even enforce the use of the trust group for applications such as wifi-radar and gparted. Any way we look at it I think we need to decide one way or another what we want to do and communicate the whys and wherefores to the community. We certainly shouldn't have .desktop files with a variety of auth systems in use.