kdesu default super-user-command

[Allen Winter]

On Thursday 22 November 2007 16:14:06 Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:
> On Thursday 22 November 2007, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 07:45:47PM +0100, Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:
> > > Yeah, except the "real" command is written to kdesu_stub's stdin, not
> > > passed as a command-line option. I don't think sudo can handle *that*.
> >
> > oops. that should be reconsidered. wanna take a look?
> 
> Hm, I did take a short look, but not sure I really want to see this through. 
> Simply making the command to run a command-line option should be easy enough, 
> but would not be the end of the story.
> 
> kdesu_stub also asks for - among other things, which should be less 
> problematic(*) - a path, and in fact allows for a complete environment to be 
> specified via stdin. I suppose if that were to be allowed, then sudo 
> restrictions are effectively meaningless once again. So could we get rid of 
> that?
> 
> kdesu (the app) uses this to carry over kapp->startupId(), KDEHOME, and the 
> real user name. I suppose these could be turned into single options in 
> kdesu_stub to effectively restrict misuse.
> 
> The path is generally copied verbatim from the environment. No idea what could 
> be done about this.
> 
> Next problem is that SshProcess also uses kdesu_stub. I suppose in this case 
> the option to set a bunch of environment variables freely can be rather 
> useful. So for this context the possiblity to pass an environment via stdin 
> should probably be preserved. Which starts to smell like having to create an 
> entirely separate stub for SshProcess...
> 
> I guess I'm starting to understand why the ubuntu people have chosen to create 
> kdesudo as a kdesu drop-in-replacement (which unfortunately is not really 
> compatible, yet, and breaks several apps). Trying to *really* support both su 
> and sudo seems to be not entirely trivial using the current libkdesu.

Will kdesu from KDE4 behave exactly as the kdesu from KDE3?
Will it have the same command line options?

If not, we need to reconsider the decision to move kdesu back into bin
and keep it named "kdesu" instead of "kdesu4".

-Allen