On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 22:18 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
Basically, I'm saying that if an application needs to do
privileged
operations it needs to use a helper. This can either be a setuid helper
(bad, but not necessarily)
Btw, consolehelper / usermode can be considered that "helper" but one of
the primary reasons that it's bad is that it launches an X11 running as
root. This means that a) the app is not accessible; b) the toolkit gets
confused and you get e.g. "root"'s home in the file chooser; c) things
like gconf don't work; d) it's generally a bad idea to run GTK+ apps as
root (image loaders, the sheer size of code running as uid 0 etc.); and
many other reasons.
FWIW, the GTK+ team seems to share this point of view
http://gtk.org/setuid.html
(of course this was written seven years ago before we had a patch
to do D-Bus system bus activation...)
I know some people still think that consolehelper is "good enough". I'm
not terribly interested in discussing that...
David