hal 0.5.1 "Sonny...?"

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 09:22 -0500, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
> > Forgot to mention that the specific goals for 0.5.2 are
> >
> [...]
> >  - Provide method invocations on hal device objects as requested by the
> >    luks/hal/gnome-volume-manager and gnome-power-manager projects
> [...]
> 
> This is good for the LUKS work.  I do have one question, something that
> was discussed a while back on this list.  How, for example, will
> gnome-volume-manager provide a passphrase to HAL through this method
> invocation interface?  More specifically, what IPC method will be used?  I
> remember discussing setting method parameters in an environment variable. 
> This, however, is not necessarily safe for secrets like passphrases.  Will
> a method script be able to read its parameter from stdin?
> 
> See also:
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2004-December/001486.html.
> 
> I just want to make sure that this is considered as the specification
> moves from the TODO file into something more formal.

Yeah, this is sort of a sticky point. Ideally, I'd just like to pass it
in the environment as it's then easy to process from shell scripts.
Reading things from stdin seems a bit difficult and somewhat fragile.

AFAIK this isn't a problem on Linux 2.6 based operating systems, only
ancient UNIX variants, yes? For interesting operating systems (remember,
hal only runs on Linux 2.6 presently but I suppose e.g. recent versions
Solaris, FreeBSD, Darwin is interesting too, dunno), is it safe to just
pass it in the environment?

Cheers,
David


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