gksu-polkit gets pipe support

One of the features I really wanted to get into gksu-policykit early was working correctly with pipes. With the current gksu you cannot do something such as echo blah | gksu tr a-z A-Z. It is actually very hard to work correctly with input/output with su and sudo bellow. I do think it also has something to do with me not being too clever in UNIX file descriptors at the time I originally planned how gksu works. I did get an email from someone at Sun offering to write support for that who never mailed me again, but anyway…

gksu-policykit is currently able to get all the input and output forwarded to/from the process by using an interface similar to glib’s g_spawn_async_with_pipes. Here’s what we are able to do already:

$ echo test string | ./gksu/gksu-polkit /usr/bin/tr a-z A-Z
TEST STRING
$

It’s impressive to me that all the input and output goes over DBus quite nicely.

So it is currently possible to use simple library calls in glib-based code to run something as root, by taking advantage of the gksu policykit mechanism:

GksuProcess* gksu_process_new(const gchar *working_directory, const gchar **arguments);
gboolean gksu_process_spawn_async(GksuProcess *process, GError **error);

The DBus service already works; it is able to setup the environment and X authorization correctly. There is still lots to do; startup notification is still not handled, and dealing with the application’s stdandard output and error messages, as well as providing a way for the caller to send stuff into the processe’s standard input. It is already possible to start an application and know that it has been finished, though.

As for the code:

$ git clone git://kov.eti.br/srv/git/gksu-polkit.git/

Criticism is welcome!

In other news… I’d like to ask our dear lazy web if anyone is using some nice way of providing only posts tagged in specific categories in a feed in wordpress. I’d like to use that to provide my posts to planet debian from my wordpress install.

As far as debcamp work plans go, my own has been making me quite happy. I started the week trying to start implementing gksu policykit mostly in vala, and failing miserably. Vala isn't ready to help me do some of the more weird things I had in mind.

The good news is falling back to C worked pretty smoothly, and I have the basic foundation working. There is plenty to be implemented still, but moving forward always feels good. If anyone is interested in discussing the gksu replacement that is being built on top of the PolicyKit framework come talk to me in the hack lab =D. Take a look at this gratuitous screenshot.

First day at debconf8's debcamp! I have published an ical file with the stuff I plan to attend, if anyone is interested: http://people.debian.org/~kov/kov_debconf8.ical.

Btw, dear lazy web, the official ical file is using ART as TZID, and that seems to make Evolution go nuts on the timing of the talks. Anyone has got a clue on what my be happening? I downloaded the file and changed it to use America/Sao_Paulo as TZID and now Evo acts correctly.

So, some interesting things happened since I last reported. TurboGears finally entered experimental, and has received a bit of good feedback from some users; I became sqlobject co-maintainer, and packaged a svn snapshot to experimental to make that happen, too. TG 0.9a8 has just been uploaded, btw. Feedback would be great! I would welcome people willing to help on deciding the best way and doing packaging of TG add-on widgets.

In other news, I've been doing some last feature aditions to libgksu and gksu. The former now ships a gksu-properties capplet that allows users to set up some of the behavior. The gconf options and this capplet surely need some love, but they'll get it in the future. After the "redesign" libgksu now holds almost all the code that does the gksu magic, and should be more secure in some ways.

The application, gksu, ships a nautilus extension, which adds a 'open as administrator' item in the context menu for files and directories in Nautilus. I'd love to receive feedback and buf reports on this new feature. Right now the nautilus extension uses the gksu application, instead of the library, since there seems to be problems with doing async calls of libgksu inside of another main loop, or something, and I could not get it to work.

The gksuexec application, which provided the 'Run as another user' menu item has been removed in these last versions. Will anyone miss it? I'm willing to have this functionality implemented in gksu itself, if needed, but I'm not sure it's that useful.