[sf-lug] GKsu has long been EOLed

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 2/13/19 1:48 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):
>
>>      <https://itsfoss.com/gksu-replacement-ubuntu/>
> Subject header was rather... um... wrong, so I've corrected it.
     Thanks for the correction to my incorrect choice of terminology.
>
> There's been for some years a small graphical tool called GKsu aka gksu,
> which is a little gtk-based wrapper for sudo, although weirdly it always
> behaved by default a little more like su than like sudo.  (IIRC, GKsu
> is paired with a companion tool called GKsudo, which has semantics
> closer to sudo's by default.)  Anyway, long years ago, the upstream
> maintainer hung up the towel, i.e., it's been orphaned, unmaintained.  I
> can't remember why.  _Some_ gtk-based tools have over the years gotten
> orphaned because the maintainers got tired of the irresponsible
> behaviour of the GNOME people, gratuitously breaking compatibility and
> necessitating near-total rewrites every time there's a major gtk
> release.  (This is ultimately why the LXDE desktop project finally
> abandoned gtk and recoded for Qt, creating the replacement LXQt
> desktop.  Because they got tired of GNOME bullbleep, basically.)
>
> Anyway {headscratch}, this isn't an Ubuntu issue.  _Every_ *ix
> (including every Linux distribution that has been packaging gksu has
> been abandoning it, because it's orphaned code that nobody's maintaining.
>
> There are a large number of alternative ways to do what GKsu/GKsudo does:
> sux, ktsuss, beesu, kdesu, gksudo, calife, chiark-really, xsu, and on
> and on.[1]  Personally, _if_ I needed to run an X application with root
> authority (a matter I'll return to, below), I'd just do 'ssh -Y
> root at localhost' and then './some-x11-app &' to launch some-x11-app with
> root authority.  (This requires having an sshd running, which you can
> restrict to localhost-access only.)
>
> The GNOME twinkies _used_ to say that GKsu/GKsudo users would be
> encouraged to migrate to their New Shiny, something they called 'gksu
> PolicyKit', but then all mention of the latter got unceremoniously
> dropped.  But hey, I'm sure they'll have a replacement soon... and then
> a replacement for the replacement, etc.
>
>
> But the real question you should be asking is 'Why the Gehenna am I
> running X11 graphical applications with root-user authority?'  It's
> dangerous to your security to needlessly run large graphical
> applications with root authority, for gosh sakes.  Why on _earth_ would
> you be doing that in the first place?

     Because a program that must be run, say Synaptic, must be run with 
root authority
rather frequently with a rolling release demands that the root password 
must be
run?  Other than that I dunno...
>
> I expect the lame excuse I'd hear would be 'I had to elevate the
> authority of the GNOME GEdit text editor to root privilege in order to
> edit a configur root-owned text file in one of the system directories.'
> No, you didn't.  Open a console, and use some nice little text editor
> like nano (with sudo if you like sudo, or su to root if not)...
>
>> As for me I don't have any problem with what Ubuntu decides to do.
> ...or sit around and wait for Canonical to tell you what to do.  ;->
>
>
> [1] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Security/root-with-x11.html

     Well 6 of one half a dozen to another.

     bliss
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