I’ll admit I have zero insight and haven’t looked into this, but at first glance, I don’t understand why a desktop environment theme engine is unable to provide enough functionality for theme creators to do their thing without resorting to arbitrary command execution…
I trust KDE devs to address this quickly, but this is a pretty major oversight IMO…
“Global Themes” in Plasma do more than just styling
To developers it’s not a surprise that third party plugins can do this sort of thing. It’s as intended. A global theme can ship custom lockscreens, custom applets, custom settings and all of these can run arbitrary bundled code. You can’t constrain this without limiting functionality.
Naturally this is not what an end user expects when browsing for themes, and the warnings don’t make up for the risks.
I hope devs can find a better way to ship this rich functionality, or at least introduce an automated “canary-release” process to the KDE Store that takes down themes that misbehave.
This sounds very amateurish from Plasmas part as allowing themes to run bash scripts sounds like a very bad idea no matter how you look at it.
Themes should probably have something like their own domain specific language (DSL) that can be fed to the “theme engine”(?) which will make the requested changes. If additional functionality is needed it should be provided through separate modules/plugins or something.
I’ll admit I have zero insight and haven’t looked into this, but at first glance, I don’t understand why a desktop environment theme engine is unable to provide enough functionality for theme creators to do their thing without resorting to arbitrary command execution…
I trust KDE devs to address this quickly, but this is a pretty major oversight IMO…
“Global Themes” in Plasma do more than just styling
https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/kde-store-content/
Naturally this is not what an end user expects when browsing for themes, and the warnings don’t make up for the risks.
I hope devs can find a better way to ship this rich functionality, or at least introduce an automated “canary-release” process to the KDE Store that takes down themes that misbehave.
This sounds very amateurish from Plasmas part as allowing themes to run bash scripts sounds like a very bad idea no matter how you look at it.
Themes should probably have something like their own domain specific language (DSL) that can be fed to the “theme engine”(?) which will make the requested changes. If additional functionality is needed it should be provided through separate modules/plugins or something.