create a link to x-sudo

[Loye Young]

gksu, gnome-sudo, and kdesudo are all packages that provide the same functionality: they provide a graphical interface to sudo that allows the user to gain root privileges. Which one depends on the default desktop environment, but from the standpoint of the program that needs root privileges, they are fungible. However, most GUI programs guess, hardcode, or depend upon a particular sudo GUI. Sometimes they get the answer wrong, which causes needless breakage and aggravation.

The various graphical interfaces to sudo should create a link to x-sudo in the /etc/alternatives directory. Then, other GUI programs can simply point to x-sudo instead of trying to [guess | parse | hardlink] which desktop environment happens to be in charge at the moment.

Such a solution would also help OEMs who want to give their customers a choice in desktop environments but also install various desktop-agnostic configuration scripts or programs. In particular, oem-config would be able to point to x-sudo irrespective of whether GNOME, KDE3, KDE4, XFCE, fluxbox, or a private label desktop environment is installed.

Happy Trails,

Loye Young
Isaac & Young Computer Company
Laredo, Texas
http://www.iycc.net

[Loye Young (loyeyoung)]

ssh-askpass is a different animal from sudo and should not be linked to this bug report. Mea culpa.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

One practical problem here is that, unfortunately, the various implementations don't have matching command-line interfaces. There is the relatively trivial matter that they support different options, but, worse, they don't do argument splitting the same way, which is problematic if you want to run a program with arguments containing spaces. Observe the mess around line 72 of http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-installer/ubiquity/trunk/annotate/jriddell%40canonical.com-20080626180713-az1snfm7zcmoecdh?file_id=ubiquitywrapper-20061218162521-5ivn7czc2jqc379k-1 for an example of problems caused by this.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

kdesudo-kde4 is a dummy package in Intrepid -> Invalidating.

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Does this bug affect gksudo? If it affects it please mark the importance to wishlist. Thank you very much!

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This issue has sat incomplete for more than 60 days now. I'm going to close it as invalid. Please feel free re-open if this is still an issue for you. Thank you.