Re: Possible mass bug filling for package depending on

On Sun 30/10/11 18:51, "Russ Allbery" rra@debian.org wrote:

Frank lin Piat fpiat@klabs.be writes:
On Sun 30/10/11 11:31 , Daniel Baumann wrote::
>> packages that need root have to use su-to-root in order to play
>> well on live systems (where you know at runtime if sudo,
>> su, gksu, $whatever has to be used). your package list contains
>> such cases. [..]
> What about moving the su-to-root binary to a different
> binary package ?
> Bill what's your PoV about spliting it ?

We've had this discussion many times, unfortunately, without any
forward progress at all. Bill would like there to be an xdg-su
or the like that is part of xdg-utils.

A XDG standard would be nice (and is the best solution), but to be
useful it sould be adopted by all existing software in Debian.

xdg-utils upstream doesn't want to support anything like that
because they prefer PolicyKit (as I understand it).

I certainly agree that PolicyKit seems to have some nice features
and therefore I understand that Freedesktop wants to go ahead with
it in the future. (I also understand that they don't want to develop
a *new* tool for legacy software using "Prior Art"/flaws [1]).

Unfortunately, from a Debian perspective, we have a different
problem: we have lots of *existing* software that were designed
according to the so called "Prior Art"[1].
It seems unrealistic to me that all existing software ever get
migrated to a $POLICYKIT thing. Many of those software will
remain as-is and die once they are superseded, and it is going
to take a while.

So we need to maintain a tool compatible with the existing
sofware and art, don't we?

(We might even imagine that at some point, some sysadmin will want
to make sure that no single $SUDO program is installed in their
permises, but that's another story).

Clint isn't interested in adding a sensible-su with similar
functionality to sensible-utils.
Bill wasn't interested in splitting menu in the absence of one of
those more general solutions.

We're at an impasse and have been for about three years.

(Thanks, I fount #514882 on this topic).

Any chance to go ahead? It would be a pity if the only solution was to
fork su-to-root (and possible merge xdg-su[2]) in a new source+binary
package :-(

Regards,

Franklin

[1] http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/Pol...story.html
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...ugQ4882#26


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