Re: [Synaptic-devel] Automatic Proxy setting

[Michael Vogt]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 11:30:38AM +0200, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
[..]
> > 2) is not a big deal, but 1) is really tricky. Does anyone have a good
> > idea?
> 
> I think if you use  libgksu
> http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libgksu1.2-0 in synaptic you can
> start running synaptic as a user, (so you can get the user gnome proxy
> settings) and then ask the root password

Yes, good idea! Unfortunally it's still a bit tricky. gksu let's you
start a new process as a different user, but you can't switch the user
of the running process. So what we have to do is the following:

1. Start synaptic as user, do not lock anything
2. When the user selects "apply", run gksu with 
   "synaptic  --non-interactive --hide-main-window --set-selections"
3. This will start a new synaptic as root in non-interactive mode.
   It will wait for all selections (those need to be feed by the parent
   non-root synaptic) and then download and execute the changes. 
4. After root synaptic finished, signal non-root synaptic to reread
   it's cache. 

We are half-way there. We need to make --set-selections a bit smarter
so that it understands "force version" changes and we need to add
--hide-main-window (trivial). Beside that the functionality is
there. We also need _lots_ of testing for this new code :)

thanks,
 Michael

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