[packagekit] Debconf and PackageKit Was Re: Packagekit and Ubuntu

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 04:06:45PM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On 5 February 2010 23:15, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > proposing an addition, or is there already a transaction ID of some kind
> > in the environment that we could use in debconf?  If you could point me
> > at the environment variable I'm missing, I'd be grateful.
> 
> I can add the transaction-id to the spawned backend if you like -- if
> this is enough for you. Yell if you want something more.

We're assuming here that the transaction-id is secret, I think, because
the point is that the rootly debconf can talk to an object on the system
bus whose path is constructed using the transaction-id, and be sure that
that object was started by the PackageKit client.  Is that assumption
sound?

I'm assuming without having checked that objects on the system
bus can hide their paths from non-root processes.  If that isn't the
case, then the UI process will need to use an anonymous object path and
the rootly backend will need to explicitly check that it knows the
transaction-id.  This is the same as the access control that James was
talking about earlier, I think.  This might be clearer anyway if we
aren't guaranteed to be able to use all the characters of a PackageKit
transaction-id in an object path; I haven't looked at the format.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]