Comment on global shortcuts security

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 08:21:44 +0200
Daniel <danlist at terra.es> wrote:

> El dt 25 de 09 de 2012 a les 11:15 -0400, en/na Kristian Høgsberg va
> escriure:
> > On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 04:53:20PM -0700, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> > > Keystrokes should be sent to the application first. Only if the
> > > application refuses them should they be considered global shortcuts.
> > 
> > No.
> 
> Could you elaborate a little bit the logic leading to this decission,
> please?

It is a roundtrip, which is already bad in itself. Furthermore, it
allows clients override global shortcuts of the compositor, which
means that it would be impossible to have secure shortcuts, e.g.
"kill this client" or "switch sessions". Third, if the client
hangs, it would mean global shortcuts would stop working, and you
could not e.g. alt-tab away from a frozen window, which might be
even fullscreen.

It would also mean, that every application would need additional
code to cooperate with the compositor. Missing that code would by
default stop all global shortcuts from working. Programmers would
have to spend effort to not break the *whole* desktop, instead of
just having their app working right with the desktop by no effort.

You might invent elaborate schemes to overcome the latter cons,
but even the roundtrip argument alone is a serious one, and there
would have to be a serious benefit in doing so. This would just
bring a lot more problems than it would solve.


Thanks,
pq