Re: [Synaptic-devel] Automatic Proxy setting

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Michael Vogt wrote:

> 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. 

Eek. That's going to blow the already largish memory requirements 
sky-high. 

> 
> 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 :)

I suppose it's ok to have this new mode but PLEASE don't make it
mandatory. I'm certainly not willing to sacrifice dozens of megabytes
memory just for the convenience of getting proxy settings from users
setup.

        - Panu -