KDE RedHat project

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 22 Aug 2005 16:00:37 -0400 (EDT), Sean wrote:

> Would be nice to avoid the need for the command line.   Wouldn't a simple
> popup having a boilerplate warning and the description extracted from the
> rpm be sufficient?   If not, what else is needed?

At least one hurdle that makes it less easy. ;)

The simple click-click-click-to-add-a-repository bears just too many
risks, because its target group would _not_ verify painstakingly what will
be added to the system configuration.

>   Remember this is about
> generic rpm installation of any program, not just rpms containing repo
> entries.

Clicking onto a local *.rpm file opens the system-install-packages command
by default, which in turn prompts the user for the root password. That is
easy and dangerous enough.  As soon as system-install-packages can access
the configured online repositories in order to resolve dependencies, what
else do you need?

>  I suppose there should be a more verbose warning message if the
> rpm isn't signed with a trusted key but beyond that how much more "secure"
> can you make it?

Theoretically, _much_ more secure, e.g. with fully relocatable packages
and a user-writable RPM database, so the user can install _some_ packages
without needing superuser privileges.
 
-- 
Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at users.sf.net>
Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz) - Linux 2.6.12-1.1398_FC4
loadavg: 1.02 1.14 0.92