Hi José, On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 07:47:35PM +0200, José Esteban wrote: > Is it realistic to hope you to remember such many little things like this > each time you setup some system ?
Yes, that is part of the administrator's job. That and many other little details, including reading command output when you issue a packaging command as root. There is no getting around having to know and remember things but on a case by case basis we can suggest tools to make life easier. You've already been advised about apt-mark. Another common practice in systems administration is the idea of configuration management. You express desired system state and the configuration management tool puts the system into that state. "I want sudo installed" wuld be part of that state. Examples of popular configuration management tools that support Debian are Ansible, Chef and Puppet. Others exist. I don't think there would ever be a way to avoid having to carefully check things you do as root though! We have all been there with a careless command. > How many headless systems usually work without sudo ? Mine have a variant of sudo but I expect there are several large corporations that between them have hundreds of millions of servers without sudo, and thousands of administrators who have gone their whole working life without ever using or wanting sudo. > I'm worked a whole life making software and I've always acted to ease my > users' life... but may be just me. Fact is you only got sudo installed on your system because some other software you installed depended upon it. Please explain how Debian is supposed to know that you actually want it independently of that other software? At the moment your argument is, "I always use sudo so Debian should just know." Usage of sudo is not as widespread as you think. Your suggestion to make it essential would force it to be present on everyone's Debian. I guarantee there would be more complaints about that than yours. I will point out again that people on this mailing list have no authority whatsoever in Debian. It is very possible that someone sent you here to complain about this as a means for you to blow off steam with no actual change happening in the world. We aren't the ones you have to convince, but possibly you have been sent here to just debate it. Or else there is some misunderstanding about why you were pointed at debian-user. > Thanks for the response; I'll try to remember to apt-mark sudo as manual > installed next time. Automation exists for when you want it. No more need to remember apt-mark or countless other little details, but the price is having to learn about the whole world of configuration management! Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
