Bug#349652: gksu: failure with X authentication (wrong .Xauthority entry)

[Tim Van Holder]

Package: gksu
Version: 1.3.6-1
Severity: important


I cannot pinpoint exactly what packages I installed/upgraded before this started
to happen, but yesterday I found I was no longer able to run Synaptic from the
gnome menu.  .xsession-errors showed X authentication errors.

Upon further checking, I found that the problem seems to lie with gksu, as
running the command via su, sudo (with DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY in env_keep) and
'gksu -S' works fine.

The cause seems to be that a bad .Xauthority file is created - running
gksu "xauth list" resulted in only one line

  $hostname/unix:2 ....

while running "xauth list" as myself gave me 3 lines for display 2:

  $hostname/unix:2 ...
  $hostname.$domainname:2 ...
  0.0.0.0:2 ...

and DISPLAY is set to the second form (by the X server I presume).
Running "gksu 'xauth add $hostname.$domainname:2 ....; emacs'" works.
Setting DISPLAY to $hostname/unix:2 before running gksu also works.
Neither seems particularly acceptable though - I would expect gksu to set
up the environment correctly.

(In case it matters, the X server in question is Xrealvnc)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-686-smp
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages gksu depends on:
ii  gconf2                        2.12.1-8   GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libatk1.0-0                   1.10.3-1   The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                         2.3.5-8    GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgconf2-4                   2.12.1-8   GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libgksu1.2-0                  1.3.7-1    library providing su and sudo func
ii  libgksuui1.0-1                1.0.7-1    a graphical fronted to su library
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.8.5-1    The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-keyring0             0.4.6-2    GNOME keyring services library
ii  libgtk2.0-0                   2.8.9-2    The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  liborbit2                     1:2.12.4-1 libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0                 1.10.2-1   Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpopt0                      1.7-5      lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  sudo                          1.6.8p12-1 Provide limited super user privile

gksu recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information