gparted menu entry depends on gksu

gparted does have gksu as a "recommends:". However, if the gksu package is manually removed by the user, then yes, gparted running from the menu will be broken. This I think is true for other sudo requiring gnome/gtk packages when ran from menus on KDE and I imagine conversely true for KDE apps that use kde's sudo menu entries when on gnome.

Perhaps what is needed is an "alternatives" method to support different sudo via a symlink based on the desktop. This is a broader question of course, like the idea of a "sensible-sudo" that might for example be a script that uses $DESKTOP_SESSION. The packager could also change gksu from a "Recommends:" to a hard "Depends:", but I think this is not a good solution.

Here's a proposal for a sensible-sudo. The Exec line in the desktop file should look like

sensible-sudo --desktop %k -- /usr/sbin/gparted

I added sensible-utils as an affected package, maybe this script could be included there.

My observation was simply that we have $DESKTOP_SESSION, and hence we could use it to do a "smarter" sudo for the desktop, which for gnome (or xubuntu) calls gksu, for kde the kde one, and if there is no desktop session or X at all (such as a ssh or console instance), maybe just calls terminal sudo. I could make it into a formal small blueprint for Narwhal for sensible-utils if there is interest in something like this.

I think the approach I used in my script should be sufficient: If a KDE session is running (based on $KDE_FULL_SESSION), look for kdesudo first, then for gksudo. If no KDE is running (GNOME, XFCE, ...) look for gksudo first, then kdesudo. Those are all X sudos I could find.

If a X session is running, it shouldn't really fall back to plain sudo since the user will never see the prompt if the script was called from a desktop file. Maybe I could change it such that it will fall back to sudo unless the --desktop parameter was given.

Relying on $DESKTOP_SESSION is more complicated, because for example on my box it just says "default" and I'd have to go looking in some X config files to find out what that means (ie. find out which window manager I'm currently using).

I tried to implement a third option with kdialog and SUDO_ASKPASS but in the end it got to error prone for a feature which is probably never used (since when kdialog is installed there will probably also kdesudo). And it seems like xdialog isn't included in Debian/Ubuntu anymore.

In the end, gparted should just use PolicyKit or whatever instead of being started completely as root, but I guess it will take a while until that is the case.

Here is a revised version of the script which skips the plain sudo only if --desktop was given.

A 'sensible-sudo' already exists, only it's named 'su-to-root' and is part of the 'menu' package (which builds menus for Debian systems since before there was a freedesktop.org-based standard for it). I haven't tested it, but from reading the manpage it should do what you want.

This was fixed in gparted (0.8.1-1ubuntu3) by switching to pkexec.