A common VFS and a Common conf-system [Part II]

[Sean Middleditch]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 21:01 +0100, nf2 wrote:
> Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 11:37 -0500, gtg990h at mail.gatech.edu wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>other applications in which 'desktop' and 'CLI' apps have to work together.
> >>We're talking about UNIX desktops here --- CLI apps won't just go away, and its
> >>useful to the user to allow them to work together.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Then they will need to be ported just like the desktop apps.  I'm rather
> >looking forward to getting some CLI apps using D-VFS, such as Vim.
> >  
> >
> I agree with that - DVFS should also work in a GUI-less environment - 
> but there might be a problem with secure authentication. If 
> authentication callbacks are directed to the client application like in 
> Gnome-VFS it would be easy: The CLI client application could just prompt 
> the user for the password. But if you want a secure solution with a 
> "trusted helper process to do all user interaction" (I think KIO does it 
> that way) this might be more complicated...

This was something I was thinking about, actually.  It is a problem when
you're not running in an xterm or whatnot.  My current thinking is that
since the authenticator will not be the daemon itself, but a D-BUS
service, that it would be possible for an application to register itself
as the authentication helper.  In a console environment, this would just
work.  When the same app is run in an xterm, since there would already
be a registered authentication helper (or should be), the app would not
become the auth helper and the normal desktop utility would keep
precedence.

That might be kinda flaky when starting up a very lite weight X session
and then running a console app in an xterm and then starting up some
other D-VFS using apps, though.

It would also be possible to just have an API in D-VFS for adding auth
callbacks, and then have the daemon refuse to use them if an
authentication helper is already running on the D-BUS service.  That
makes more sense to me, personally, but there might be some downsides to
it that I haven't thought of.  Anyone?

> 
> Cheers,
> Norbert
>  
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>