Re: 'synaptic' removed from buster

[Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org>]

On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 03:46:52PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> The solution seems simple enough, fix wayland.  This is after all a 
> multiuser and multitasking OS, why go out of the way, way out of the way 
> to make it work like win-3.0?

The notion of running a client as user X to talk to a display server
running as user Y seems to directly contradict the Wayland security
model.  As far as I can understand it, given the rather vague Wayland
documentation I've seen so far.

I think the "correct" fix for synaptic would be to redesign it to run the
graphical interface as you, communicating with an auxiliary process that
runs as root which can install and remove packages.  That second process
could be a child of synaptic, or an independent daemon of some kind.
Authentication methods to be determined by whomever does the work.

I would not describe this solution as "simple".  Maybe you had a different
solution in mind.