Bug 510576 - still requires usermode for gnome-about-me
Summary: still requires usermode for gnome-about-me
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: control-center
Version: 11
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Control Center Maintainer
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2009-07-09 19:59 UTC by Bill Nottingham
Modified: 2014-03-17 03:19 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-07-24 14:46:11 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
patch (3.55 KB, patch)
2009-07-23 23:42 UTC, Matthias Clasen
no flags Details | Diff

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.


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