Bug 510576

Summary: still requires usermode for gnome-about-me
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Bill Nottingham <notting>
Component: control-centerAssignee: Control Center Maintainer <control-center-maint>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 11CC: control-center-maint, mclasen, rstrode, rvokal
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OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2009-07-24 14:46:11 UTC Type: ---
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patch none

Description Bill Nottingham 2009-07-09 19:59:05 UTC 
Description of problem:

Why again are we patching out the upstream password changer? The usermode one looks pretty lame in comparison.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

F-11 GA.
Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 2009-07-09 20:00:53 UTC 
Also, switching back appears to fix both bug 484786 and bug 235484.
Comment 2 Matthias Clasen 2009-07-23 23:41:40 UTC 
Working on it. Unfortunately, the upstream code does not work so hot, either. It scrapes the output or /usr/bin/passwd, but it can't understand half of what our passwd has to say. Plus, for some reason that I haven't been able to figure out yet, out passwd runs into SIGPIPE instead of exiting regularly.

The attached patch has a workaround for that.
Comment 3 Matthias Clasen 2009-07-23 23:42:34 UTC 
Created attachment 354939 [details]
patch
Comment 4 Ray Strode [halfline] 2009-07-24 14:46:11 UTC 
So, looking at the upstream code it's not really suitable to use:

1) Screenscraping /usr/bin/passwd is fundamentally broken.  It will always fail in some cases, because different users have different pam modules, different users have different translations, and the existing pam module strings get updated once in a while.

2) The code races with itself in various places (handles sigchld before reading all of stdin, etc)

3) The code calls SIGKILL on passwd.

We could fix 2 and 3, but 1 is going to be a continual ongoing problem.

We could make gnome-about-me use libpam or libuser, but we're eventually going to drop about me anyway, so probably not worth the time investment.