Re: How do I open a kwallet4 in Stretch?

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

On Freitag, 25. März 2016 22:14:51 CET Borden Rhodes wrote:
> > If you have enough disk-space, you could build a jessie chroot with
> > debootstrap
> 
> Could you explain how that would help me? If the Wheezy version of
> KWallet couldn't open the file, what would Jessie accomplish?
> 
> > I suggest you bring that issue to upstream at bugs.kde.org
> > 
> > Please post a link to your report here.
> 
> Will do. Given my success rate at having KDE bugs addressed, or even
> looked at, over the past several years I guess I'm on my own.

Well even 4:15.12.1-1 of Konqueror is still Qt4 based.

I do think it would be good to raise that issue. In case you write a bug 
report I may even write this to the distributions list as that issues puts 
distributors like Debian into a difficult situation.

It is sad to see, but Konqueror does not seem to deserve the love it needs and 
deserves.

So another option would also be to also file an distribution bug via reportbug 
and ask for packaging of kwalletmanager4 for the time being. So either its 
packaging kwalletmanager4 or porting Konqueror to Qt 5 / KF 5 / Plasma 5 to 
resolve this issue.

Actually I´d do both and likely be vocal about it about some upstream list 
like the distributions one. But for me it is not much of a concern right now, 
cause I do not use Konqueror for serious web browsing anymore, i.e. anything 
that requires a login. Its just to outdated and probably has a ton of security 
issues. Neither its KHTML nor its Webkit backend are supportable security wise 
from that I understand. I think at least about one of them check-support-
status of the package debian-security-support warns about having limited or no 
support at all.

So if you want to browse with maximum security, as to what I understand, you 
need to use Firefox / Iceweasel or Chromium and upgrade it timely. I don´t 
like this either and would prefer Konqueror anytime, yet, at the moment I do 
not think its a good option due to the lack of maintenance. Which brings even 
deeper, cause one of the issues is that both KHTML nor Webkit aren´t well 
maintained. Thats why Laurent put a lot of effort to port Akregetor to 
QtWebEngine which uses Blink from Chromium and also why Laurent / Sandro port 
KMail HTML mail view to QtWebEngine as well. But even that one is outdated. I 
think Qt 5.6 will come with Blink as of Chromium 45 (current is 49).

If I see the amount of CVEs fixed with each new release of browser engines and 
the lack of embedability and supportability I think the browser engine 
situation is a huge, big, fat and utter mess for application developers. There 
is just simply no sensible option out there at the moment. Its a known state 
even – for years already. Maybe some day with the Servo engine from Mozilla, 
which claims to be embeddable nicely…

Free software web browsing is a mess and the only options that are supported 
reasonably is using Firefox / Iceweasel and/or Chromium directly.

I think it would be good to have something like LibreOffice foundation just 
for an embeddable browser engine. But so far there isn´t something like that. 
Its doubly sad as both WebKit and Blink AFAIK originate from KHTML, but the 
companies changed it too much so changes to it cannot easily be backported to 
KHTML.

> If I could just access the wallet the same way Konqueror does, that
> would work since Konqueror has no problem. Unfortunately, I downloaded
> Konqueror's source to see where it calls KWallet and, of course, it's
> not in the code. Is there a way that I could talk to kwalletd
> directly?

I think it will have a dbus interface.

Aside from that I think Konqueror uses some library to access kwallet, instead 
of doing it directly.

But well, actually as long as Konqueror still uses the old kwallet I´d make it 
a habit to store anything that you add as passwords with the new wallet 
manually. Actually meanwhile for any important web login I manually make an 
entry thats indepepent of Konqueror or Firefox (using its own thing, kwallet 
plugin as packaged by Sandro does not yet work for me) and Chromium (storing 
passwords as binary blobs into kwallet).

I even have a GPG file with some secrets still floating around, from the time 
where neither the old kwalletmanager would still work, nor the new one would 
work, so I couldn´t access any kwallet with GUI.

There also has been a kwallet cli at some time, but I doubt its packaged 
currently. I think it would be usable with old kwallet in case you compile it 
yourself.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin