[enchancement] Fork into SWHKS when not detected

[newtoallofthis123]

Currently, the SWHKD model functions on a client server architecture. Hence, the server (swhks) would have to be active through out the life span of the main swhkd daemon. However, this creates a user experience barrier, along with complications on the side of handling the code itself.

Hence, this is a proposal to add mechanisms to start / fork the swhks server automagically during the execution of swhkd, if it doesn't detect the server already running. This can be easily achieved by checking the swhks.pid file in the runtime dir.

This would significantly improve the UX and the need to mention ./swhks & pkexec ./swhkd -d would not be necessary. Moreover, this can also help the transition to a more newer privilege model.

[HamzaMateen]

This is an interesting case to tackle, but I reason that it would need privilege de-escalation before launching swhks since we are bound to launch swhkd via pkexec so its children will inherit is privileges as well. what is your say

[newtoallofthis123]

That is exactly the problem I am tackling right now 😄
pkexec is spawning the process in sudo.

However, I am looking into ways that we can launch swhks without the privileges. Any suggestions would be appreciated :)

[InnocentZero]

This looks like a good idea but I'm not entirely sure if it is the best idea with the privilege model atm. Afaik this needs to be immediately after we are done with getting a hold of the file descriptors and then immediately after we call drop_privileges. Maybe some other things as well, I'm not sure.

[manthanabc]

I think we can simply let swhks be the "main" binary, the one started by a non-privileged user. From there, we can detect whether swhkd is running. If not, we do pkexec swhkd or equivalent to launch the daemon, for which the user will be prompted for authentication by polkit?
this ensures swhks runs in correct privilege mode, which is important since it determines the privilege level of user's scripts in the config file.

i can work on it if this if it is an acceptable solution