[Portland] RE: [lsb-discuss] OSDL DTL Tech board on Portland - Thu, Aug 3

[Wichmann, Mats D]

Snipping some bits...

>Major changes: dropped xdg-su tool.
...
>Main pushback based on philosophical grounds. Shouldn't invite 
>graphical apps to runs as root.
...
>Picassa includes xsu, example of demand for this kind of functionality.

Do we know what for?
For install-time things, installation already runs as
root (although I expect there's going to be progress
made towards that not always being true eventually).
What run-time things need temporary root?  

>Noticed that some test report were run as root. Not needed 
>to do that, when running as normal user test suite will 
>ask for root password and su to root in order to run tests
>both as normal user and as root. That way it will do more tests.

So the test suite is a use case for xdg-su :-)