Comment 23 for bug 15093

Hi Eddie,

Well, I'm no expert on this I'm afraid. But as far as I understand it the problem is as follows: gksudo is basically a graphical front-end for sudo, and therefore it needs to know when sudo asks for a password. PAM modules however present their own prompt, which may be quite different from the standard "Password:" one. If that happens, gksudo will not recognise the custom password prompt and will just keep waiting. The first patch just tells sudo to override the PAM prompt in such cases, so that gksudo will recognise it. The problem is that this breaks certain kinds of authentication (which of course is not a problem if you don't need those, as in my case). The second patch adds an option to sudo allowing for a postfix-string to be appended to the password prompt. gksudo can then simply wait for this string, and then pass its password to sudo. However, this patch is still waiting to be included in sudo. As it has been submitted in two years ago, it seems that the sudo developers do not consider it to be a priority feature.

So in short, the problem with gksudo and pam is not really a bug, it is just a result of the way gksudo is implemented as a front-end to sudo. The best way to get it fixed would be to let the sudo maintainers know that this is really a feature that people do need, and to help them test it. Here is sudo bugzilla link again: http://www.sudo.ws/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=180

As for your problem, the patched version of sudo may or may not solve it. It probably depends on what kind of prompt the bioapi module presents, if any. I wouldn't be too worried about patching sudo though. You can easily see what the patch does just by looking at the code. Furthermore, you can always go back to the original sudo if it doesn't work. The only problem is that the link to the patched version will probably get overwritten if sudo is updated...

Best regards,
Levien