RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Wednesday 28 July 2010, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> On 2010-07-28, Chani <chanika at gmail.com> wrote:
> > the way I read, it, lubos was suggesting something more like "if
> > you want to install support for $feature, click here" instead of
> > "oh, you don't have $feature, good luck finding and installing it
> > on your own!"
> 
> And the 'click here' is exactly what I'm opposing to.
> 
> In a short while, evil websites will start do magic like
> 
> if(khtml or qtwebkit) {
>     do_popup_asking_for_login_credentials();
>     send_credentials_to_evil_owner();
> }
> 
> masking it as a 'to view this page properly, you need to install a
> additional plugin. please enter your root password to continue'.
> 
> And yes. Users is that stupid. We should not help the bad guys.

If users are really that stupid then why do evil websites need to wait 
for us to add such a "Click here" question? They could simply do what 
you say today (and they probably do already).

Anyway, there are many ways to ensure that the user cannot take a fake 
dialog for our dialog, e.g. we could darken the rest of the desktop 
similar to what Windows 7 does. Evil websites cannot fake this. Of 
course your stupid users will still click on the fake dialog but, quite 
frankly, I couldn't care less. Some people simply cannot be helped 
regardless of what we do (or not do).

Also, AFAIU Lubos's proposal you can simply disable the "Install me" 
functionality for Debian by implementing a KDebianInstall which always 
returns false. Of course this would be rather ironic because Debian 
users are usually a bit more informed than users of other distros.


Regards,
Ingo
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