GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 61063
`run as root' in context-menu of menu items
Last modified: 2015-03-24 13:00:35 UTC
Hi, I think it would be nice to have a `Run as Root' item in context-menus of menu entries that would ask for the root password (like the ximian setup tools do for example) an then run the program with user-id 0.
Adding relevant keywords. You can filter on the phrase 'luis doing GNOME2 work' to catch all instances of this so that you can ignore them.
moving to gnome-panel, seems unnecessary for most apps imho.
This is a bad idea: 1. not sure context menus really make sense for menus 2. Who is this aimed at? This is only convenient for home users who are smart and don't want to run their computer as root. In large installation, this is useless since very few users will be able to run as root anyway. This leads to the question who is our target audience. More likely than not i'd say gnome should be aimed at large installations (eg. schools, kiosks etc.) where such a feature is really useless to most users.
Maybe this could be made into a feature that could be enabled by sysadmins? Some gconf setting that could be activated using gconftool or gconf-editor would make the menu entry pop up?
We should avoid running random applications as root and the ones that need it should use something like consolehelper to ask for the root password. I don't think there a use case for any application normal to run as root that the author didn't intend to run it as. I'm going to close WONTFIX unless someone knows of a common situation where this applies, then feel free to reopen.