Desktop Entry Spec : RootRequired entry

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
>> For su it's easy, just check if the user is in the group 'wheel' or
>> 'root' (depending on the system). 
> 
> I have the root password, how do you know that? The limitation for su to
> the wheel group is only in the BSD's I think.

I don't remember exactly, but I think this is the behaviour on most of
the commercial Unices. I think the limitation is only present in GNU su
(Stallman had some weird reason for this).

Anyways, this will be system-dependent, no matter what you do.

>> For sudo it'd require parsing the
>> sudoers file.
> 
> The example was running gnome-terminal with su somewhere in the
> arguments. We're not going to parse all the command lines, are we? You
> are also already special casing su and sudo, but programs may have other
> means to gain root priviledges, isn't it?

A cross-platform solution, independent of the mechanism (that is su,
sudo, etc.) would be perfect, definitely. But I doubt that this will
ever be the case. So you'll need to limit the supported mechanisms. And
if somebody really needs something other than su or sudo, then he/she
should set RequiresRoot=No and use "mysudo program" or whatever for Exec.

> It seems to me that the spec would be better of starting small, with
> only 'RequiresRoot=Yes|No'.

There's no advantage over the current situation if you cannot tell
whether or not the user is allowed to execute the program as root.

>     Jasper

Benedikt