[izpack-devel] Need a bit of info on the Mac

[Pierre Frisch]

I have looked at it this will not do.

This panel has quite a few short comings:

It relies on a common but not universal behavior of sudo. When you  
execute a sudo command the "user" will stay authenticated for a  
period of time. So the way it works is by executing a dummy sudo  
command in an external shell and relying on the fact that this will  
keep the installer authenticated. This works on most stand alone  
installation but that security policy can be changed and is  
frequently changed when you are installing on a system that is part  
or a larger organization.

I am also a bit troubled by the fact that all localization features  
of that panel are commented out? Does anyone uses it?

I do not have a ready made solution to this problem but I think we  
should come up with a better approach. The alternative is to ask the  
user to execute the installer with a sudo:
sudo java -jar xxx.jar. That way the actual installation process is  
authenticated. The drawback is that we loose the graphical user  
experience. On a Mac you can double click the installer and it will  
run but with user privileges, if we can find away of escalating the  
privileges that would be nice. What I have seen done, is a two stage  
system; a first process launches, request admin privileges and then  
launches the real installer with the admin privileges  
(InstallAnywhere works that way). This can be fairly transparent to  
the user.

I would be very interested in working on that problem but we need to  
find a consistent way that would work on all platforms.

Pierre

On 10-Jan-06, at 2:55 PM, Hal Vaughan wrote:

> On Tuesday 10 January 2006 05:33 pm, Pierre Frisch wrote:
>> Where is the contributed panel? How does it work? Can it mimic the
>> way the Apple installer works? i.e. start the install as regular user
>> and authenticate when the install scripts requires it? I suspect that
>> sudo is a bit narrow as the authentication depends on the security
>> policy of the machine you are using.
>
> I can't give you all the details, but I found SudoPanel in the panels
> directory with all the other panels and it's in the JavaDocs,  
> although there
> is not much in he way of comments to help figure it out.
>
> Hal
>
>> Pierre
>>
>> On 10-Jan-06, at 1:59 PM, Julien Ponge wrote:
>>>> So are there cases of installs where IzPack has to be done through
>>>> sudo or as
>>>> an admin user?
>>>
>>> /Applications is users-writable, so typical installations run fine
>>> as a regular user and you don't need to sudo the JVM. However for
>>> special cases you can need this. There was also a contributed
>>> SudoPanel.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Julien Ponge
>>> http://www.izforge.com/
>>> GnuPG ID: 0xCD9DE030
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> izpack-devel at lists.berlios.de
>>> http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/izpack-devel
>>
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