Re: [Setup-tool-hackers] [HST] Plans for coming week - please read

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj helixcode com>]

> - Enable the tools to su themselves, while we wait for a release of
>   root-manager and/or console-helper. This is the biggest gripe people have
>   now, and I've heard it three or four times already. We might use the hack
>   from the Stormix distribution (?), that talks to su through a pty (I'll try
>   to find the message that mentions that). If that fails, we can just chop
>   our own heads off and make the tools +s, using a crypt() check.
> 
>   Particulary important because it keeps novice users from trying out the
>   tools, and we really need them to.

Here's the mail I read on that:

---

From: Peter Hawkins <peter@hawkins.emu.id.au>
To: gnome-hackers@gnome.org
Subject: su(1) for gnome...

With respect to gnome-utils/mini-utils/gsu ... I noticed recently that
Stormix have a gtksu in their distribution which we may be able to snaffle
instead. It's not amazingly portable, (needs a getpt() call, but that could
be replaced with gnome pty helper)... but possibly worth looking at.

Their implementation works by opening a pseudo terminal and dup2()ing that
file descriptor into stdin, forking and execing su(1), and writing the
password into it. It has the advantage that it is _very_ simple, not much
that could go wrong, assuming su(1) behaves as expected. It also doesn't
require a patched su.

There's no license on the file, but everything else stormix do appears to be
GPLed.

ftp://ftp.stormix.com/pub/storm/dists/hail/main/source/x11/gtksu_1.5.tar.gz

Worth doing?

=)
Peter

---

It don't think it'll be that hard.

--
Hans Petter