cups ppd files

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Paul Howarth wrote:

> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>> On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>>> That seems perfectly sensible to me.
>>> But I don't see why it requires you to have two different programs
>>> with the same name.
>> 
>> I don't really get this either.  All of the system-config utilities in 
>> /usr/bin are symlinked to consolehelper.  Many have no /usr/sbin 
>> counterpart.  Yet they seem to start just fine when invoked as root.
>> 
>> My guess is that the /usr/sbin ones are artifacts of a pre-consolehelper 
>> era and could be removed with no ill effects.
>
> You guess wrong. That would cause them to stop working. Consolehelper is not 
> some super-configuration utility replacing all of the system-config-* 
> programs, it's just a simple wrapper that prompts for the root password, 
> switches to root (assuming the passwird was correct) and runs the requested 
> program from /usr/sbin.

OK I stand corrected (makes sense, actually).  But I still don't get:

(a) It appears that invoking /usr/bin/system-config-* as root does not 
redundantly prompt for the root password as has been suggested in this 
thread.

(b) How does consolehelper know what utility to invoke?  It can't be quite 
as simple as you suggest.  For example, /usr/bin/system-config-users is a 
symlink to consolehelper, but there is no /usr/sbin/system-config-users 
program for consolehelper to invoke.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs