[Fingerforce-devel] Bug#444059: Bug#444059: thinkfinger-tools: Prompt breaks gksu / gksudo

[Luca Capello]

tags 444059 - patch
notfound 444059 0.3~ppa3
reassign 444059 libgksu2-0
found 444059 2.0.5-1
tags 444059 + upstream
forwarded 444059 http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?19132
thanks

Hello!

FYI, I cc:ed the ThinkFinger mailing list, if anyone who replies want
to do the same he should manually do it.

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:30:45 +0200, Justin Dugger wrote:
> Package: thinkfinger-tools

The PAM module has its own package, so you should have reported it to
libpam-thinkfinger instead.  However, this is not at all a ThinkFinger
bug, but a libgksu one, reassigned.

> Version: 0.3~ppa3

Please use a version present in Debian or, at least, explain where it
comes from (Ubuntu package in this case), corrected.

> Severity: important

I'm not sure 'important' is the correct severity: while for sure
gksudo (not gksu, read below) hanging is a problem, it's not the worst
possible scenario (again, read below).

> The current prompt cause gksudo and gksu to hang waiting on a finger
> scan.

gksu-2.0.0-4 never hangs in my case (called as simply as `gksu xterm`
or as `gksu -u luca xterm`), while gksudo yes.  And FWIW applying the
~/.thinkfinger.bir patches by Christian Neumair [1] doesn't change
anything.  So, this is *not* a ThinkFinger problem.

FWIW, I searched on the net and indeed this bug has already been
reported, in Ubuntu [2][3][4] and upstream [5].  Some solutions have
been proposed, but no one has been accepted, yet.

> This is known to upstream and I have no confidence that it will be
> addressed any time soon.

Which upstream are you talking about?  I'd say that since this is not
a ThinkFinger bug, ThinkFinger upstream will never address it [7].

> In the meanwhile, I've got a patch to change the prompt if not
> displaying to a tty, often seen on thinkfinger-devel. It works well
> on my system. Though it's not obvious that gksudo and friends will
> accept a fingerprint, they do.

For what concerns ThinkFinger, I won't apply any patch which doesn't
belong to the upstream project.  AFAIK the PAM implementation in
ThinkFinger is standard, so if other programs doesn't work with that
it's not a ThinkFinger problem.  For that reason, any hack to have
those programs working with ThinkFinger doesn't belong to ThinkFinger
at all.

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Footnotes: 
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.thinkfinger/424
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gksu/+bug/86843
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gksu/+bug/52018
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gksu/+bug/15093
[5] http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?19132
[6] except for the possibility to translate the "Password or swipe
    finger: " sentence, but this is another issue which has nothing to
    do with this bug