PolicyKit agent for KDE3

[Serghei Amelian]

On Tuesday 26 June 2012 17:27:19 you wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Serghei Amelian <serghei at thel.ro> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm trying to create a polkit agent for KDE3, using dbus calls and
> > polkit-agent-helper-1.
>
> Two things:
>
> 1. Please don't do this - just use libpolkit-agent-1.so instead, it's
> much easier and it's better if we are all using the same code.
> Especially since this code is security-sensitive and involves
> passwords and whatnot.
>
> 2. polkit-agent-helper-1's interface is *NOT* public - it's a private
> implementation detail of libpolkit-agent-1.so. So you can't just use
> it in your re-implementation. E.g. its interface *can* and *will*
> change as the innards of libpolkit-agent-1.so change. So don't use it
> in your re-implementation (feel free to copy-paste it, license
> permitting etc.).
>
> Make no mistake: the only stable interfaces in polkit are the D-Bus
> interface and the libpolkit-gobject-1.so library (the
> libpolkit-agent-1.so library is still considered unstable).
>
> I can't force you to follow this advice and you are of course free to
> re-implement and re-invent whatever code you want (and occasionally
> doing so is a healthy exercise but sometimes it also isn't). But I
> just don't have time to support this effort (my time is limited as I'm
> working on a lot of other stuff), hope you understand.
>
> Thanks,
> David

Hi David,

I expected this response, but i'm trying to do this for several reasons:

1) Qt3 does not support glib event loop natively, so I can't handle signals 
(at least, not easy). Moreover, my glib knowledge is very limited, which will 
increase development difficulty and potential security problems.

2) It is a good opportunity to demonstrate how polkit is working using pure 
dbus calls. I'm guessing dbus was invented to be toolkit agnostic, so I think 
that this very tight link to glib is against the dbus spirit.

I'm aware that polkit-agent-helper-1 is not stable and I'm prepared to make 
changes in my code when polkit-agent-helper-1 will suffer modifications.

Also, there is no reason to worry about security in polkit agent. It just 
receives a request from polkit daemon, asks the user for password then calls 
polkit-agent-helper-1 (which I presume that is secure enough).

Thanks anyway, I will try to understand polkit sources, maybe I will figure 
out what i'm missed.

-- 
Serghei