[geeks] broken software

[der Mouse]

[Sorry for the delay; I was away on holiday, out of touch with my
mailbox, for about a week.]

>> All of the explanations below are pure guesswork, but they seem
>> plausible to me.

>>>	libgnome-keyring.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0 (0xb75d1000)
>>> Why does the clock applet need access to keyrings?
>> So it can speak to the server through a secured channel, using
>> crypto for authentication instead of MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 - and
>> possibly for conidentiality too.
> That doesn't have to be at the app level.

Then one of us has misunderstood the other.

The application is *necessarily* responsible for the client end of the
communication channel between the application and the X server.  This
includes generating whatever authorization information is necessary to
get the server to permit the connection - and if that includes strong
crypto, it may well require accessing some kind of keyring.

> It can be in the X server and the app never needs to care about it.

> That's the beauty of X: you can convert the communications to being
> your grandmother and a wheelbarrow, and the apps don't need to know
> about it.

Not at the source-code level, no.  But they do at the executable-file
level, including the linked-in-libraries level, because they have to
have the code to dump the packets in your grandmother's wheelbarrow for
wheeling over to the server's input funnel.

The only way to avoid this is to use some kind of proxy so that the
client thinks it's talking to a normal server (whatever "normal" means
for your system), which then deals with whatever is necessary to get
the bits to the real server.

> Anyway, going a bit further, even without the libraries, I find the
> clock applet also uses several megabytes of its own allocations, and
> it leaks memory to the tune of abut 15K per hour.

> Nothing like taking a bad problem (the current shared library mess)
> and making it worse, eh?

Delightful, innit?

I offer my own clock program - only 70776 bytes according to size(1),
on my SPARC - in case it does enough for you to be happy with it.  It
needs no Gnome, KDE, etc; it uses just -lXext -lm -X11.  See
ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/X/ - you want mclock.doc and the
files listed in the fifth paragraph thereof.  As always, I'll be happy
to talk about it, and in most cases to help deal with trouble building.

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