gksu wakes up the system from idle state 2300 times per second, obviously
polling for something. This can be verified with powertop on any reasonable
new (supporting ACPI) ix86 system. This is unacceptable most importantly,
because it makes power saving on notebooks impossible, while running gksu.

To reproduce just start gksu and either run powertop (you also have to
enable CONFIG_TIMER_STATS in the kernel configuration) or run strace on
gksu.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.24
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages gksu depends on:
ii  gnome-keyring          0.6.0-3           GNOME keyring services (daemon and
ii  libatk1.0-0            1.12.4-3          The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                  2.3.6.ds1-13etch4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcairo2              1.2.4-4           The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libfontconfig1         2.4.2-1.2         generic font configuration library
ii  libgconf2-4            2.16.1-1          GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libgksu2-0             2.0.3-7           library providing su and sudo func
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.12.4-2          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-keyring0      0.6.0-3           GNOME keyring services library
ii  libgtk2.0-0            2.8.20-7          The GTK+ graphical user interface
ii  liborbit2              1:2.14.3-0.2      libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0          1.14.8-5          Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libstartup-notificatio 0.8-2             library for program launch feedbac
ii  libx11-6               2:1.0.3-7         X11 client-side library
ii  libxcursor1            1.1.7-4           X cursor management library
ii  libxext6               1:1.0.1-2         X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxfixes3             1:4.0.1-5         X11 miscellaneous 'fixes' extensio
ii  libxi6                 1:1.0.1-4         X11 Input extension library
ii  libxinerama1           1:1.0.1-4.1       X11 Xinerama extension library
ii  libxrandr2             2:1.1.0.2-5       X11 RandR extension library
ii  libxrender1            1:0.9.1-3         X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  sudo                   1.6.8p12-4        Provide limited super user privile

gksu recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

This was fixed in libgksu 2.0.5-1.

It's in Lenny, but I don't think there are any plans for a backport.

Thanks
Guennadi
---
Guennadi Liakhovetski