On 2/13/07, Aniello Del Sorbo <anidel at gmail.com> wrote: > > Yes, and the Application Manager (by looking at the packages flags > somehow) could tell if this is a system app (and thus ask the User to > enter somekind of passphrase) This would require a user passphrase exists. Presently one does not. I suppose the device lock code could be set and "system apps" could be flat out denied until a lock code is set so it can be entered. AFAIK dpkg has an option (--force-non-root) that tells it to "Try to > (de)install things even when not root". Thus there will be no > customization for these tools. Everything would be transparent. > > I still don't understand why this cannot be done in an easy way from the > maemo team. Doesn't dpkg store it's list of installed packages (not sure how debian does it, but I'm thinking of the world file for gentoo) somewhere that requires root to access? This would have to be changed, or can it be done through flags as well? Would be rather annoying if dpkg looses knowledge of previously selected packages because it couldn't write changes to the list... On 2/13/07, Frantisek Dufka <dufkaf at seznam.cz> wrote: > Aniello Del Sorbo wrote: > > > Yes, and the Application Manager (by looking at the packages flags > > somehow) could tell if this is a system app (and thus ask the User to > > enter somekind of passphrase) or a user app (thus installing it with no > > hassle). Asking the User for a kind of passphrase will give Application > > Manager root privileges and thus dpkg could be ran as root and those > > apps would install as usual and do their (good) job. > > > > And how is this different from the current warning about non Nokia > application? I simply fail to see any additional security. > > I think I can answer this one. It doesn't. A malicious/careless developer could still create a package that might brick your system by flagging the package as a system package. However, a careless developer would be less likely to accidentally brick your device as unflagged packages would be installed without root access. The issue is moot over all because we're already protected from careless developer. Even the most careless developer is going to test an application on their own tablet before releasing it and will not release if it bricks their device on install. A malicious developer will just flag their package as "system" and let the user click ok on the additional dialog. Correct me if I'm wrong here... --Paul -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-users/attachments/20070213/2a650bea/attachment.htm
