KIO Admin
I’ve gotten annoyed with the inability to manage system files so I’ve made a KIO worker that enables Dolphin to view and edit files as root.
The way this works is actually fairly exciting. It’s pulling off worker chaining: The admin worker itself contains gloriously little logic, all it does is translate all worker calls to dbus calls, and those dbus calls go out to a privileged polkit helper. The polkit helper then translates the URIs from admin:///foo to file:///foo and uses the regular KIO API to recreate the request in root-scope. KIO then, behind the scenes, acts just like it would in dolphin proper, using the existing file worker code to execute the file operations.
The advantages are amazing! It’s fairly little actual code (albeit a lot of boilerplate). Since it’s an ordinary worker on the Dolphin side we can expect all file operations to just work™ because really admin:// is just like trash:// or desktop://. Because ultimately the file worker is actually in charge of doing the work, all things are generally expected to work (it’s the same code that powers regular file operations).