"Failed authorisation"

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1

Hi

This is not really a big deal, but I’d like to be able to fix it if easily done.

I run 13.1 and KDE. Normally I have two KDE sessions running, my own (F7) and my wife’s (F8), with separate user accounts. I use apper for update management, but as I don’t want my wife to be troubled with updates, apper is only active on my account. When my session has focus, all is fine, and I get all the expected apper notifications. But if my wife has been using the machine for any length of time, when I return to my session I get a number of “failed authorisation” messages, the number of them corresponding to the number of refreshes apper was scheduled to attempt in the time the F8 session was open.

Is this the intended behaviour in these circumstances, or should this behave more nicely? :slight_smile:

Regards

Fred

2

I don’t use a two-session setup, so I have not seen what you describe.

It might just be telling you that it could not post a notification when your session was inactive, even though it was still at work behind the scenes.

In your wife’s session, right click on the tray and open “System Tray Settings”. Make sure that the box for “Software Updater” is unchecked.

3

Thanks.

I do already have Software Updater “off” on the second account. Yes, it does seem to be as you say, with apper doing its hourly checks but for some reason being unable to report the result. That’s odd though; why can’t it report the result when it can report the failure? After all, the failure messages all appear correctly when I switch back to that session. Maybe it can initiate the check but because of some permissions problem it no longer has authority to do the actual repository accesses.

Perhaps I should report it as a bug in apper.

4

Maybe it does. Maybe there are no software updates to report, so by reporting nothing (other than the failure) it is reporting the results.

This probably has to do with the way X works.

If you open a terminal session, you can try typing the command:


xauth list $DISPLAY

The output will show the “MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE” that is used to authorize access to your screen. When a program (such as apper) wants to present a popup message, it has to present that magic cookie. When your wife is lusing the display, the X-windows system is only going to accept her magic cookie. So when Apper presents your magic cookie it gets an X-authentication error.

If you were the programmer designing Apper, you would have several choices on what to do when there is such an authentication error:

  1. Do nothing (silently ignore the problem);
  2. write an error message to “stderr” (it would show in in your “.xsession-errors-:0” file;
  3. save the error message and report later when it can succeed;
  4. abort the entire program;

It seems that it actually doing (3), which is a whole lot better than doing (4). But you would probably prefer it to do (1) or (2).

I don’t see a setting to control that.

You could report a bug if you want. You would probably be asked to report it upstream (to the KDE bugzilla) as an Apper bug or feature-change request.

5

That does make sense. I probably won’t report a bug; there’s plenty of stuff which is more worthy of the developers’ attention!