Feature Requests item #885021, was opened at 2004-01-26 15:22
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by lschiere
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Category: None
Group: None
>Status: Closed
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Stephen Tihor (stihor)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Relocatiing configuration files
Initial Comment:
In order to use GAIM in a secure appliance it is
necessary to move the configuration directory to a
location selected and setup by the secure wrapper.
This style of activation is also natural in network
applicance and Kiosk applications where user state is
maintained externally to the traditional UNIX file system.
The normal Unix approach woudl be to set the
Environment variable HOME to point to the containing
directory for the .gaim tree. However GAIM appears to
use the GNOME glib library's g_get_homedir call which
ignores all environmental options and onyl retursn the
contents of /etc/passwd with no options to override or
redirect.
The motivations for this choice were unexpected
behavious in some su/sudo like contexts for naive users.
(In some cases when changing UID if the wrapper is not
well written one might end up with a read only HOME
directory or an unreadable one. As a security
professional I can easilly imagine circumstnaces where I
might want either of those, redirecting or disabling
features requiring a writable home directory as
appropriate.)
The solution to permit well written applications to
maintain UNIX semantics was for the applications using
gtk+/glib (such as gaim) to make the appropriate
g_getenv("HOME") calls themselves if they want to have
the normal UNIX sematics. (Or perhaps use an
application specific environment variable to locate their
configration file if it is not in the usual place and then let
that file instruct the application where to fine everything
else.)
We will be glad to try and assist in developing a solution
that works well for the naive GAIM user as well as KIOSK
and other hardened deployment environments if you
need assistance or find the method recomended by the
GNOME developers (calling g_getenv("HOME") first and
only invoking g_get_homedir if that returns NULL) is not
appropriate.
(I appologize in advance for notbeign able to search the
archives to see if this is already addressed in the bug
list, I do not appear to have search access at the
moment.)
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Comment By: Luke Schierer (lschiere)
Date: 2007-04-20 10:55
Message:
Logged In: YES
user_id=28833
Originator: NO
As we are closing this tracker, please submit any feature request that is
still valid to http://developer.pidgin.im. Thanks.
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You can respond by visiting:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=350235&aid=885021&group_id=235
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