Re: Announcing apt-watch: a Gnome 2 panel applet to check for upgrades
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 07:21:41PM +0100, Emile van Bergen <emile-deb@evbergen.xs4all.nl> was heard to say:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 01:09:51PM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>
> > I can test whether a package version comes from security.debian.org
> > easily, by looking at the list of archives it's in. (the applet -- or
> > rather the suid helper -- links to libapt-pkg)
>
> What part of the process requires root privileges, exactly? A mere check
> for updates ideally shouldn't change anything on your system, just
> queries the dpkg database and apt sources, so I see no theoretic reason
> for it to require a suid helper? That would also solve the
> authentication problem.
You have to download new versions of the package lists, which are stored
in /var/lib/apt/lists.
This could be worked around by storing the downloaded lists in the
home directory of the current user -- although that has a different
drawback (they would have to re-download the updated lists in the "real"
package manager, which is a bit confusing)
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| You are in a maze of twisty little signatures, all alike. |
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