Re: Graphical 'su' utility for GNOME

[Chema Celorio <chema ximian com>]

On Sun, 2001-10-28 at 14:01, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> 
> 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

who is "we" in this context ?

> 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.

I don't think a config patch will do. 

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

Right. the xst-su aproach does not require us to patch the .desktop
file.

> 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.

Chema