Looking for opinions on authorization frameworks for Pallet

[Kyle Sammons]

Hey Ian,

Thanks for the offer, unfortunately, however, Pallet doesn't run any shell
commands (everything is passed done through spinning up a Tcl shell and
passing input/output through IPC), so I'm afraid your example wouldn't work.

Thanks again, though!
-Kyle

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 06/08/2015, at 4:14 AM, Kyle Sammons wrote:
>
> > Hey everyone,
> >
> > Currently I'm at a fork in the road for the Revitalizing Pallet GSoC
> > project, and was hoping to crowd source some ideas about how to deal
> > with the Apple authorization framework used to get super user privileges
> > to allow 'port' to execute correctly under the hood. This task is the
> > last major one on my GSoC queue. There are three possible roads to go
> > down here; I don't know which one is the "best" or "correct" one, hence
> > the crowd sourcing here.
>
> Here is another possibility, which I used in Fossick…  Note that I went the
> command-line route and used "tail -f" to receive output asynchronously.
> You may not need that if you have gone the other route.  The guts of the
> authorisation is to use AppleScript.  Hope this helps.
>
> /**
>  * This method uses AppleScript to run a privileged Unix script
> asynchronously
>  * in the background, with output to a file (e.g. a script containing
> MacPorts'
>  * "port install <software item>" command).  The NSTask object defined
> above
>  * uses "tail -f" to collect the output as it occurs.  The return string
> is nil
>  * if the script started OK or contains an error text if it failed.
> AppleScript
>  * is run "with administrator privileges", which means that it pops up the
> usual
>  * Apple request for an admin password when installing non-Apple software.
>  */
> - (NSString *) runPrivilegedScript: (NSString *) filePath
>                             output: (NSString *) outputFilePath;
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> - (NSString *) runPrivilegedScript: (NSString *) filePath
>                       output: (NSString *) outputFilePath
> {
>     NSDictionary * error;
>     NSString * script = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"do shell script " \
>                          "\"'%@' >'%@' 2>&1 &\" " \
>                          "with administrator privileges " \
>                          "without altering line endings",
>                          filePath, outputFilePath];
>     NSLog(@"SCRIPT: %@", script);
>     NSAppleScript * appleScript = [[NSAppleScript new]
> initWithSource:script];
>     if ([appleScript executeAndReturnError:&error]) {
>         NSLog(@"AppleScript running! '%@' >'%@' 2>&1 &", filePath,
> outputFilePath);
>
>         // Start the output-watcher.
>         self.task = [[NSTask alloc] init];
>         [self.task setLaunchPath:@"/usr/bin/tail"];
>         [self.task setArguments:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:
>                             @"-f", outputFilePath, nil]];
>         self.tailOfOutput = [NSPipe pipe];
>         self.errorOutput  = [NSPipe pipe];
>         [self.task setStandardOutput: tailOfOutput];
>         [self.task setStandardError:  errorOutput];
>         [self.task setStandardInput: [NSPipe pipe]]; // No standard input.
>         [self.task launch];
>         [[self.tailOfOutput fileHandleForReading]
> readInBackgroundAndNotify];
>         [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter]
>                   addObserver: self
>                      selector: @selector (receiveOutput:)
>                          name: NSFileHandleReadCompletionNotification
>                        object: nil];
>         return nil;
>     }
>     else {
>         NSLog(@"Failed to run AppleScript!\n%@", error);
>         return [error description];
>     }
>     // TODO:  "User cancelled." is a possible error reason (i.e. hit Cancel
>     //        instead of entering a password).  OS X seems to allow
> unlimited
>     //        failed attempts to enter the password.
> }
>
> > 0. Do nothing; leave the current code in place, but continue to ignore
> > it; require the user to run it with superuser privileges;
> <snip>
>
> Cheers, Ian W.
>
>
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