Bug#351059: gksudo: no longer works since DSA 946 (sudo)

[Jon Dowland]

Package: gksu
Version: 1.2.5-3
Severity: important

gksudo cannot be used with stable's sudo as of DSA 946-1[1] as the
DISPLAY environment variable (and perhaps some related to X authority,
etc. - not sure how that works) are no longer inherited from the calling
environment.

There is a related bug[2] filed against sudo, specifically complaining
about the documentation angle.

I found the solution in a blog posting[3]: add the following via visudo:
Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY"

Finally, [4] looks like where the problem was introduced.

I suppose gksudo needs to be more aware of the environment variables it
needs, check to see if sudo will propagate them, and inform the user if
it won't (or postinst/debconf "fix" the sudoers file). What do you
think? Do you have another solution in mind?

[1] <http://www.us.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-946>
[2] <http://bugs.debian.org/349129>
[3] <http://snafu.priv.at/interests/debian/sudo.html>
[4] <http://bugs.debian.org/342948>

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.11-jmtd
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages gksu depends on:
ii  libatk1.0-0                 1.8.0-4      The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgksu1.2-0                1.2.6-2      library providing su and sudo func
ii  libgksuui1.0-0              1.0.4-3      a graphical fronted to su library
ii  libglib2.0-0                2.6.4-1      The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0                 2.6.4-3.1    The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libpango1.0-0               1.8.1-1      Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  sudo                        1.6.8p7-1.3  Provide limited super user privile

-- no debconf information