Desktop Entry Spec : RootRequired entry

Rodney Dawes dobey at novell.com
Mon Aug 29 21:08:03 EEST 2005


What good is a spec, if everyone is going to implement it differently
anyway? It seems more like a workaround for usability issues, or
permissions details, than a sufficient specification for how the menu
structure should be determined. Setting yet another environment variable
is also probably not the best way to do it, especially since it's just
a simple boolean value.

I'm not even sure what problem this is supposed to solve exactly. The
only thing described in the mail in relation to that, is the result,
which doesn't tell me very much. It's like a request for a feature,
without explaining the problem.

-- dobey


On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 22:46 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> 
> > This seems like the wrong way to go about this to me. There are some
> > things users SHOULD see in the menu AND that require elevated priveleges
> > to use. Changing the date/time, software update tools, file sharing with
> > samba, are just some examples.
> 
> His proposal does not directly talk about what implementations
> should do with the key, the key is only offering information
> which is not available otherwise.  An implementation decides
> whether to hide the entries or not, and according to his
> suggested implementation, a user that has the root password is
> identified by USER_IS_ADMIN, and so gets the entries in the menu.
> If the administrator decides that the users do not have the root
> password, there's really no point in showing them all these
> entries...
> 
> behdad





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