Bug#232333: .desktop for ssh-askpass-gnome
On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 11:48, Ross Burton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't understand why ssh-askpass-gnome should have a .desktop file,
> how often are people going to start it themselves?
My experience with a group of 30 users at various skill/experience
levels is quite often. Many of them don't want to be bothered with
entering the passphrase on every single login, and want an easy way to
make it happen without having to open another terminal.
We also have menu entries to ssh to particular hosts, so one click to
authenticate, then another click for each ssh run. Making this part
more general will require a lot more effort (e.g. maybe even an applet
which changes color or icon when one is/isn't authenticated, with a
drop-down menu offering, say, /etc/hosts, with more frequently-connected
hosts floating to the top)...
> I feel it should not be in the menus. When it is needed it will be
> started by ssh anyway to ask for the passphrase,
No, with plain ssh, you have to enter the passphrase every single time
you connect to a different host. That's why we have ssh-add, right?
> and if someone wants it
> to start at login they can simply add it to the gnome session or their
> .xsession file. The number of people which will actually run it from
> the menus seems rather small to me.
There are two problems with this. First is that it is tedious and
non-trivial to add it to the gnome session.
Second, if you would read the bug, you'd see that both the maintainer
and I would prefer to make it easier to add to the session.
Unfortunately, neither of us knows how, nor has the time to go through
the various relevant capplet documentation and source code files, make
something work, make it work well, ensure that it complies with upstream
coding style and HIG, etc. And as you say in your debian-gtk-gnome
post, the interface itself is not straightforward, let alone the
implementation, and in all likelihood won't get into GNOME 2.6, and
therefore sarge. Hence this next-best short-term effort, which took a
few minutes to put together instead of hours or weeks.
> The reason why I love the GNOME menus over the Debian menus is that they
> are relatively crack free (i.e. no "bc" or "xdit" entries), please don't
> ruin this... :)
Right, and this isn't bc or xedit, it's ssh-askpass-GNOME. If you don't
like it, you can use ssh-askpass instead, which won't "pollute" the
GNOME menus because it's not a GNOME app.
I'm perfectly happy to do away with this when GNOME 2.8 comes out with a
better way to put it into the session. But I don't see a reason why we
shouldn't adopt it now.
Cheers,
--
-Adam P.
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