[Portland] xdg-su -u option

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 23:22 -0500, Jeremy White wrote:
> Now you can argue all day until you're blue in the face
> that it's sick and wrong (and I'm not necessarily going
> to disagree with you), but I feel the great strength of
> xdg-utils will come from solving real world problems.

<snip>

> What would you have an ISV do?  "I'm sorry, we can't give
> you that feature because it doesn't agree with our morals." ?

Clearly they would ship a helper app that runs as root and using IPC and
auth to let the main app ask for the helper to carry out the heavy
lifting. They could use D-BUS, PAM, whatever for these tasks but they
wouldn't have to; they could use their own software. When PolicyKit is
fully baked (1.0) and included in all the distros they could use that
too. I don't really care.

My point is just that we shouldn't include silly and dangerous software
such as su helpers just because some ISV's are lazy. Do you disagree?

> But we have had too much purity and high mindedness,
> in my not particularly humble opinion.

Tell me, is the Portland project about 

 1. Providing sub-optimal interfaces a'la "yes, it's bad but we know it
    works" to ISV's; or 

 2. Is it about providing stable and powerful interfaces that we will
    support for many many years? 

Because, to me, these goals conflict.

For the record, we (Red Hat) don't ship any su-helper in Fedora nor RHEL
(we do ship consolehelper which is slightly similar) so I have big
trouble envisioning how Portland can be supported on those
distributions. Just trying to state the facts.

    David

ps. usual disclaimer, I'm not speaking on behalf on Red Hat, my thoughts
are my own etc. etc.