Security modules in firefox
One bug I have open against the belpic packages is that upon installation, the security module should be enabled so that the user doesn't have to do this anymore. While I tend to agree that this might conditionally make sense, the problem, of course, is making it actually work that way.
The SuSE folks have written a mono utility to easily enable and disable modules in firefox, thunderbird, and OpenOffice.org. While that's fine, I'd like to be able to enable or disable this security module on a system-wide basis.
Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, that doesn't seem possible. That is, I can use modutil from the libnss3-tools package to create a security module database in /etc/iceweasel/profile (which gets symlinked to from /usr/share/iceweasel/defaults/profile), but firefox then conveniently ignores it.
I'm guessing the reason for that is the fact that usually, such security modules want to have certificates to go with them. In that case, you wouldn't necessarily want to share them with other users.
But in this case—a security module that enables the use of a smartcard reader to read a key from a smartcard—enabling the module system-wide should not be a security risk.
Ah, you have more than one user on your computer?
Sir, you must be mistaken.
(Sorry for my bitterness, but all those desktop-environment writers and application writers seem to be forgetting the fact that a computer can have several users (and -- OMG! -- sometimes simultaneously!). We are witnessing serious devolution here, I think).