daniel-pastalab
commented
2 years ago There is a way to install linux packages without root by installing it with --force-not-root (https://askubuntu.com/questions/339/how-can-i-install-a-package-without-root-access). But there may be a lot of problems with dependencies (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18858412/errors-installing-a-deb-without-sudo-root). Unfortunately a lot of distributions are not automatically popping up a graphical password prompt (or even have one).
If gksu is installed (which gksu) the command can be simply run with gksu:
gksu echo hello world
If gksu is not available i think the safest way is to open a separate terminal window with the sudo command (i've seen this method in the wild). The terminal will then ask the user for the password. The problem with this is you have to find out which terminal emulator is used. For that it is advised to go through a list of known terminal emulators (https://superuser.com/questions/1153988/find-the-default-terminal-emulator).
With the known terminal emulator (here urxvt) and the $SHELL variable (already used in SparkleUpdater.cs) you can open a new terminal window:
urxvt -e $SHELL -c "sudo echo hello world"
The much more unsafe method is to ask for the password from the SparkleUpdater and pass it as a parameter to the sudo command (https://superuser.com/questions/67765/sudo-with-password-in-one-command-line). But i think its very unwise to hold it in the application memory.
https://github.com/NetSparkleUpdater/NetSparkle/blob/957d131b3e3f724ad3d020da46d239248ba95dc0/src/NetSparkle/SparkleUpdater.cs#L1257
How does
sudowork here? Do we even needsudo? Does Linux pop open a thing asking for the password? (I doubt it.) Do we need to pop open a terminal and run things in there (aka make the process not silent so that they can be prompted for their password)? I'm not as familiar with how Linux works, plus there are so many distributions...Links: