GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 126052
GST should use external helper for authentication
Last modified: 2007-02-11 22:47:35 UTC
Libgnomesu is a library in gnome cvs that has been written to be a secure portable way to run programs as root. I would recommend using it for the GST for Gnome 2.6.
hmmmm, mark, there's nowadays a big problem with using libgnomesu, the gst authentication method simply provides more functionality (it's able to run the backend through ssh and su), and using libgnomesu would mean a regression... We'll have to wait and see if libgnomesu someday provides remote authentication too... :)
It seems libgnomesu can't be used in gst, because as I see in CHANGELOG file sudo backend is disabled and broken and may be removed in the future :( See comments in src/sudo.c : "Now there's no way to verify that the password has been successfully accepted, so this backend is broken. Unless I find a good way to fix this, this backend may be removed in the future." I think it's better to use libgksu - it provides a way to run programs as other users with su and sudo, look at http://www.nongnu.org/gksu/ API reference is at http://people.debian.org/~kov/gksu/libgksu1.2/reference/libgksu12-GksuContext.html There are also debian packages for this and we should just ask if gksu maintainer want to add remote authentication support :)
I think that gksu then would be a great candidate for standard inclusion in GNOME
several gnome apps in 2.13 now uses gksu/libgksu and libgksuui
DBus use makes this pretty customizable, I think I can mark this as fixed
*** Bug 344575 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***