GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 126051
PolicyKit integration.
Last modified: 2020-09-26 09:41:07 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 log viewer when /var/log/messages can't be read beause the user does not have sufficient permissions.
This would make libgnomesu a platform requirement, would it not?
Yeah, same as lots of libs, like libvncclient and pwlib etc... Does lignomesu need to be officially proposed for inclusion?
If logview is to depend on libgnomesu then yes, it would need to be proposed for inclusion in the platform. I wouldn't go to a lot of trouble on that front, though, solely based on a logview requirement, unless it's clear someone is going to implement this in logview. Logview hasn't been very actively maintained lately. It looks by the ChangeLog that Dennis's HIG changes back in may are the only substantive maintenance that's been done in a long time.
It's a pretty nice little app, but relatively useless as a normal user on most systems. Would be nice to fix it...
*** Bug 81556 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
> This would make libgnomesu a platform requirement. No, a Desktop requirement I think, much like gstreamer is. That shouldn't be a big deal.
It's still Yet Another Requirement, either way.
Created attachment 29574 [details] [review] Long-overdue patch to implement libgnomesu support.
*** Bug 308278 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
We should use a PolicyKit helper for this. Also, GVfs itself will probably gain PolicyKit integration soonish so this would be fixed with few additional efforts on our side.
Fedora carries a patch porting gnome-system-log to polkit: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=gnome-system-log.git;a=commitdiff;h=cc1125d066f5798d49bbc23604111417a0767f45 It would be nice to integrate it upstream, as it would allow us to translate its messages.
Created attachment 213607 [details] [review] Copy of Fedora patch Attaching a copy of Fedora patch here. It needs minor additional work, as it currently applies to RPM.
This is not really the best kind of PolicyKit support we could have - ideally gvfs would allow to read privileged files transparently using PolicyKit - see bug 561443 and 492000 - but it could at least avoid duplicate work for distributions to ship the patch, or slightly different patches. We need an actual patch against git master here though.
gnome-system-log is not under active development anymore and had its last code changes more than four years ago. Its codebase has been archived at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/gnome-system-log/ Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is being shut down) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.