Why doesn't KDE su provide invocation info like PolicyKit does?

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One of the things I love about PolicyKit is that it provides the information necessary to decide whether to provide or deny authorization to a process.

However, why is it that KDE su doesn’t do the same?

Screenshot_20231008_151023

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It does provide invocation details; it tells you what command will be run as root. That’s all it does, it runs a command as root. It’s just a GUI for sudo, really.

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I was hoping for something like an Action parameter, but I was probably silly to expect that that was generated based upon the context rather than manually stated by the developer.

Would the solution in this case to be to request that YaST use PolicyKit, @ngraham?

Not su -c?

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I think you might want pkexec instead of kdesu?

Offtopic but the YaST issue already exists, to signal your interest you can give it a thumbs up: Add a policykit policy that allows yast to run via pkexec · Issue #1132 · yast/yast-yast2 · GitHub

With pkexec you’re still running the whole app as root until you close it, it’s not such a great improvement aside from the nicer window. Better would be for the app to request your user password whenever a root operation is needed, but that needs to be implemented in the app itself.

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yup, su -c .

Edit: OMG - nice expansion of the github link to a greppy -C10

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God, I’d love that. However, the YaST guys seem to be of the mind that radical changes like that are never the solution over incremental ones, so I’ve been dreading making an issue for it. I’ll try though, considering they appear receptive to that one.

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