Synaptic should be able to switch from non-root to root mode without losing state
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
synaptic (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Wishlist
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: synaptic
When started without super-user privileges Synaptic goes into some kind of "read-only" mode instead of asking for the privileges when clicking on "apply".
It does show an info window at startup describing the situation, which I guess is OK (and makes this more of an enhancement request rather than a bug), but it's very easy to click-through it and forget. The "Apply" button is afterwards disabled, and the reason is easy to forget by this time.
This can be worked-around by using "gksu synaptic" as a menu-entry, but that's wrong from a security perspective (and annoying), as the superuser privileges are only required for applying the changes. (For instance, I may start synaptic just to check if I have something installed or if there are any updates available.) Asking for passwords before it being necessary -- and even before knowing if it's necessary -- is very bad security practice, because frequency trains people to enter their password without thinking.
The package manager that's started by the Add/Remove... standard menu entry is smart enough to do that, but unfortunately it's not a full replacement for Synaptic (I don't know why, but not all packages are available for selection using it).
Changed in synaptic: | |
importance: | Undecided → Wishlist |
Actually gnome-app-install is quite dump :) Since it cannot install packages itself it calls synaptic with root privileges to do the job.
ASAIK it is not allowed to raise your privilges in UNIX world. So far we would have to call another process to do the install part - like gnome-app-install.
There is the plan to use a socket for the dist-upgrade tool. D-Bus doesn't seem to be able to handle file descriptors.
Currently we use gksu synaptic in the menu entry.
Cheers,
Sebastian