kdesudo in git

[Harald Sitter]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 02:01:58PM +0200, Luigi Toscano wrote:
>> Maybe it's possible to change kdesu to expose a "please cache this" property
>> between backend and frontend (in a secure way). Better than keeping two
>> programs for exactly the same thing.
>
> I couldn't work out a secure and easy way to do that when I looked at it years ago, kdesudo works so we went with that.

To be honest (and I realize I made this argument for the past 4 years
but.. ;)) I am not sure one should put effort into this at all. That
is to say the marginal advantage kdesudo offers over kdesu hardly
seems worthwhile with su'ing things pretty much being one-off things
and in an ideal world would be entirely replaced by polkitted built-in
support (e.g. dolphin and applications doing file operations as a
different user). In particular since wayland adoption will likely
start in a year or so, at which point someone probably needs to port
kdesudo to wayland and I really do not see that happening because the
code base is perfectly hackish IIRC.
So, I stand by what I said in the past. Give kdesu (which lives in
libexec presently) a bin/kdesu wrapper that people can use to elevate
random apps and let kdesudo die. If one finds themselves kdesuing so
much that they get annoyed by the lack of caching they are probably on
to a feature problem with whatever application they are kdesuing
constantly and time had better been spent solving that problem rather
than maintaining kdesudo or looking into making kdesu cache.

HS