Polkit Support in KIO

KIO framework is used by KDE applications to provide file management abilities. This framework provides almost all file management functions that one will ever need. However it doesn’t provide any support for file management as a privileged user. So whenever there is a need to perform file management tasks with escalated privileges the application simply shows an error. A casual user may not see it as a problem but for power users, sysadmins, developers this is a huge impedance. Many users get around this by starting the whole application as root. Running Qt/KDE GUI solves the issue but its a very dangerous solution. Dangerous because if not handled properly it can cause irreversible damage to the the system. To address this issue some KDE applications are disabling being executed as root. For example, the next versions of Dolphin and Kate will show an error message and exit when started with root privileges.

Polkit is just the tool which can solve this problem. It is the standard framework used by Linux desktops to grant privileged actions to unprivileged processes. The goal of this project is to add Polkit support in KIO and further integrate it in dolphin.