Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 08:25:25 -0700
From: Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@gmail.com>
To: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: [alpine-devel] polkit...
Message-ID: <20140913152524.GA1783@newbook>
Precedence: list
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="LZvS9be/3tNcYl/X"
Content-Disposition: inline
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12)


--LZvS9be/3tNcYl/X
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline

I was planning to upgrade, so I ran this:
apk update --simulate
apk update
#same number of packages
apk upgrade --simulate

Having run a polkit-free system for several years, I was not happy to see
"adding polkit". (In my past experience, it is a royal pain to get working
right if you use startx and a minimal window manager.
And when it was working, plain authentication worked better for me than the
policies...)

After reading up, I figured out that it was a precaution for the
brightness helper that xf86-video-intel ships with, related to a CVE in
that helper (it was writing to /sys/class/backlight/%s/brightness,
where %s could be any valid portion of a path name).

Now, as an aside:
The latest version of that helper checks for the presence of '/' in the
command line and exits if found.
This theoretically would still allow writing a new file with one of two
names (/sys/class/brightness or /sys/class/backlight/brightness) if you
use '.' or '..' as the path, except the open/fstat test handles that.


Anyhow, I tested my laptop, and found that I can change the brightness
even if the helper is chmod a-x.
So I wrote the attached apkbuild to satisfy the polkit dependency.
I'd guess that it should not be added to the main repo, since it might
cause an automatic "upgrade"; but some people might find it handy.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham

Aside: I have X starting at boot as a user via this line in inittab:
::once:/bin/su -c "xinit 2>/dev/null >&2" -l idunham



--LZvS9be/3tNcYl/X
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=APKBUILD

# Contributor: Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@gmail.com>
# Maintainer: Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@gmail.com>
pkgname=polkit-dummy
pkgver=9999
pkgrel=0
pkgdesc="Never install polkit"
url="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.os.linux.slackware/bKnh6db3l-U"
arch="noarch"
license="PD"
depends=""
depends_dev=""
makedepends="$depends_dev"
install=""
subpackages=""
source=""
provides="polkit=$pkgver-r$pkgrel"

_builddir=
prepare() {
	local i
	cd "$_builddir"
	for i in $source; do
		case $i in
		*.patch) msg $i; patch -p1 -i "$srcdir"/$i || return 1;;
		esac
	done
}

build() {
	cd "$_builddir"
}

package() {
	mkdir -p "$pkgdir"
}


--LZvS9be/3tNcYl/X--


---
Unsubscribe:  alpine-devel+unsubscribe@lists.alpinelinux.org
Help:         alpine-devel+help@lists.alpinelinux.org
---