Re: Graphical 'su' utility for GNOME

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Chema Celorio <chema ximian com> writes:
> > Whatever we do here, please keep in mind that at least two major GNOME
> > platforms (Red Hat and Solaris) will likely need to strip out cheesy
> > su programs, since we use PAM instead. (I'm not sure if Solaris has
> > the consolehelper-type functionality though.)
> 
> We developed xst-su because of problems we found with PAM. For PAM to
> work correctly, as redcarpet does, it needed distro specific patches
> which are a pain to maintain, this is the motivation behind writing our
> own su program.

Sure, but we are going to maintain the distro-specific patches for our
PAM stuff; what we need from upstream is an easy way to drop them in
and turn off the su thing. Then we can just remove gnome-su from the
file list, make a config file patch, set up our consolehelper stuff,
and go with it. No problems.

What I'm asking to avoid is e.g. having to patch every desktop file to
remove gnome-su from it.

I guess it probably doesn't matter that much for now, since I can't
even think of a gnome desktop component that requires root privileges,
but it's an issue to think about.

Havoc