Where's Konqueror in SU

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 11:09 -0500, Richard Ryniker wrote:
> Is this properly a Fedora or an upstream issue?
> 
> If the KDE/Konqueror code upstream contains prejudice against operation
> as root, then Fedora has no finger in this pie: it simply packaged the
> code.  The "allow/disallow root" argument belongs upstream; it is not
> a Fedora issue.
> 
> If Fedora has modified the upstream code to create this aversion to run
> as root, then there are two questions:
> 
>   1.  Is it approprate to do this?  This thread already contains enough
>   comments to strongly suggest there will be no concensus about this.
> 
>   2.  Has this been done in a thoughtful way?  It may be an appropriate
>   default setting (avoids risks Fedora thinks users may not expect or
>   understand), but it should be possible to modify this default so root
>   operation of Konqueror is possible.
> 
> If one builds Konqueror from upstream source, does it balk when invoked
> as root?  If it does, argue upstream.  If it does not, look further into
> what Fedora has done, but you now have a Konqueror you can use as root.

I think a lot of people are arguing at cross-purposes here. Let me try
and clarify.

No-one believes you should not be able to run Konqueror as root, as far
as I can tell.

What some people are saying is that you should not be able to log in to
the entire graphical desktop from the graphical login manager as root,
which is arguably true, but entirely irrelevant to the main issue here.

Most importantly, there is actually a big bug at the root of this
discussion, it's filed and marked as a release blocker and there's an
updated selinux-policy available that ought to fix it. The bug is
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=532748 , the fix is in
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=139739 . The bug
stopped the 'kdesu' command working, which is what KDE internally uses
whenever it wants to run something as root, and what some users are used
to invoking directly to run KDE things as root. I suspect those who hit
this bug were trying to run 'kdesu konqueror', and it wasn't working
because of this bug. Others ran 'su -; konqueror', saw that it worked,
and were confused.

Does that hopefully clear most things up?

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net