Comment 2 for bug 685349

I am able to reproduce this bug on Maverick, under certain conditions.

A Maverick system installed normally, using the Desktop Install CD (like a Natty system installed normally) does not suffer from the problem. Like with Natty, when I install a command-line Maverick system and then install the ubuntu-desktop package, gksu uses su instead of sudo.

However, I found that enabling the maverick-proposed repository and updating the packages on the system solved the problem. So I did some testing, and found that the specific package management operation that changed the gconf2 key /apps/gksu/sudo-mode from false to true was upgrading the package libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 from version 1.4.4.1-0ubuntu1 to version 1.4.5-0ubuntu1.

It seems to me that the gksu package ought to set /apps/gksu/sudo-mode to true on installation; that is, I am certainly not asserting that the problem lies in the package libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 (nor that the problem is somehow now fixed in Maverick). But perhaps this explains some of the problems reproducing previously reported incomplete bugs regarding gksu authentication failures.

Note that this does *not* explain why it is that /apps/gksu/sudo-mode is set to true on a system installed normally, but false when ubuntu-desktop is installed on top of a command-line system.