BrokenPipeError after enabling the "hotkey" RubberStamp about howdy HOT 2 OPEN

#879 only fixes the case when you're trying to run howdy-gtk yourself on X11. For security reasons, pkexec only runs the program in a minimal environment. Setting org.freedesktop.policykit.exec.allow_gui to true does retain the $DISPLAY and $XAUTHORITY variables such that howdy-gtk can connect to the display server. On Wayland this doesn't work as it doesn't allow other users access to the wayland socket. It's possible to "hack" around it with the root user by setting WAYLAND_DISPLAY to the full path of the socket and setting XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to some value (or just pass both those vars). But these variables aren't passed by pkexec (I think), so it's not possible to implement this hack.

The issue here is a bit different. The compare.py script is spawned by the pam module with an empty environment (source). It would be possible to pass $DISPLAY and $XAUTHORITY without issue as these are kept. This won't work on Wayland however as the $WAYLAND_DISPLAY and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR are not kept by the sudoers plugin. (Yes you can configure it, but you really shouldn't)

In the ideal case someone figures out how to run the howdy-gtk popup properly under the current user when invoked by PAM.

My current laptop does not have IR camera's so I'm not really interested in working on this (and no time as usual). I do want to keep maintaining my copr repos, so feel free to mention me if changes are needed. I really hope this project will someday reach a point where I can include it in Fedora.

from howdy.

@principis Thanks so much for the detailed response! I think I'm going to keep this issue open in hopes of someone fixing it in the future. Meanwhile I think I'll continue to use howdy without the rubberstamp.

from howdy.