[arch-dev-public] An introduction to gooeydo

[Phil Dillon-Thiselton]

On 30/07/07, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> Yeah, but the question is when will we implement another script that does
> the same sort of thing for (say) setting the desktop background?

I'm new to this business so, with the upmost respect:

This is solution to an actual problem that exist _right now_ (tm).  I
don't think we're in any danger of accidently setting a precedent by
going with any solution.  We all know the fluidity of the situation
and I think we know to base decisions on current circumstances.

> If we just keep implementing similar scripts for the user to choose between
> equivalent alternatives, why don't we look at what other people are doing
> to solve the problem?
>
> My Fedora contact told me about consolehelper which they use now and
> PolicyKit which they plan on moving to next release.  PolicyKit actually
> looks pretty cool, even with desktop integration (using dbus, sorry Aaron).
> Gnome will be moving to PolicyKit soon.  Hopefully KDE will follow.
>
> PolicyKit is also an fd.o project, so it's pretty mainstream.

I'm not the smartest guy in the room but this looks to me like a new
sudo/gksu/run as root auth system, rather than something to manage the
multitude of existing run as root auth systems.  It also looks like
applications have to be built with support for it.

> There aren't really any easy solutions to this.  It's a tough problem that
> no one has solved generally.

Well, Ubuntu solved it by setting a standard.  They use sudo, so I
guess that they use sudo in all their .desktop files.  We could do the
same.  We could even enforce the use of the trust group for
applications such as wifi-radar and gparted.

Any way we look at it I think we need to decide one way or another
what we want to do and communicate the whys and wherefores to the
community.  We certainly shouldn't have .desktop files with a variety
of auth systems in use.