[hardy] seahorse password dialog not always modal

Today, I was prompted for a password for my ssh key while I was typing into a terminal, saw the dialog, and went to type the password and it went into the terminal. I was using compiz when I first reported the bug, but have since moved to metacity.

This happened again today, when prompted for my ssh key passphrase. This might be related to the changes that occurred in:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413278

Seahorse removed its ssh support and started using gnome-keyring. It is not clear if it is a but in gnome-keyring or seahorse's interaction with it.

This ought to be a higher priority. It's a usability issue but because it's a passphrase-related one it's really a security issue. These dialogs need to steal focus the way gksu does.

As opposed to this bug's original issue, please take note of the following:

In its current form, the password dialog wouldn't let the user paste anything into the passphrase field. This is (or at least, could be) of a certain importance, when thinking of a complex passphrase being copied from an application storing passwords so as to eliminate the need to remember the passphrase.

In fact, this is what I (and possibly others) am doing when, for example, signing an e-mail: I am using a panel applet for Revelation (password safe) which holds my PGP passphrase. Until (including) Gutsy, when the passphrase was prompted in the password dialog (of Gnome's keyring manager, that was), I copied the passphrase from the panel applet and pasted it into the password dialog, as the passphrase is rather complex and consists of a series of digits and letters I can't remember. This is now impossible as according to my description above the password dialog won't let me paste anything, even if I copy the passphrase to the clipboard beforehand.

Hi,

I think I have the same problem.

Whenever I use gpg, the password dialog of seahorse (or gnome-keyring) is opened *behind* the terminal. I can type in it, but it doesn't have focus.

So I have to click on it in the taskbar every time to get it to the foreground, which is quite a hassle. (Yes I want to see where I type, even if it's just *****).

I attached a screenshot to illustrate this. You can see the password dialog hidden behind the slightly transparent gnome-terminal.

Another problem with this:

I have "Ask me before using a cached passphrase" enabled, and it is not possible to click the "authorize" button until the focus is on the dialog window. It's also impossible to press enter to authorize while the window is in the background.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could someone experiencing this issue please report it to the authors on http://bugzilla.gnome.org? Thanks.

Thanks for linking upstream.

Could someone with Compiz Fusion / Desktop Effects turned on test the SVN version of seahorse mentioned in the upstream bug report or tell me how to compile a new seahorse-agent from the SVN version so that I don't break my Ubuntu and can test it myself?

I've just uploaded seahorse and seahorse-plugins with todays svn-snapshot to my ppa. Should be built in ~ 1 hour. See https://launchpad.net/~andreas-moog/+archive . If you need help, just ping me on irc (ampelbein) or drop a message here.

I'm sorry but I no longer have access to the system where the problem occured and I can't reproduce it on my laptop at the moment. I don't use seahorse on the laptop normally and when I tried it manually I couldn't recreate the problem.

I just encountered this again on Jaunty with metacity.

Thanks for the update. Can you give a few steps to recreate the problem? I tried various times now and could not get the faulty behaviour (in jaunty).

I have not seen this in a while on Jaunty. I am going to mark this as Fix Released, and if it comes up again, I'll reopen.