incompatible to at-spi

[Francesco Fumanti]

As synaptic makes use of gksu, it inherits its incompatiblity to at-spi.

Example about how to reproduce the problem:
 - Enable at-spi by putting a checkmark in the Enable assistive technologies setting of the System->Preferences->Assistive Technologies control panel.
 - Enable an assistive tool that uses at-spi; for example, enable the simulated secondary click in the Accessibility tab of the mouse control panel. (System->Preferences->Mouse)
 - Try to start the Synaptic Package Manager by using the corresponding menu item in System->Administration.The desktop becomes partially unresponsive because this menu item is configured to use gksu that is not compatible to at-spi. (You can switch to a virtual terminal (f.ex.:ctrl+lt+f1) and kill the gksu process to make the desktop responsive again.)

The proper way to fix this would of course be to fix the problem in gksu itself; but I don't know whether that will happen in the near future:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449159
http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?24952

Consequently, as the Synaptic Package manager is a central application in Ubuntu, I wonder whether it could not rely on something else to get root privileges for the operations that need to run under root, instead of waiting for a fix of gksu.

Could the Synaptic Package Manager not use policykit to get root privileges when necessary?