Hi Stroller,
I received your reply twice, so I guess you are subbed :)
David
On 18/05/11 03:30, Stroller wrote:
On 15/5/2011, at 1:10pm, Antoine Martin wrote:
...
Note that you sent this to the parti/xpra mailing list, and not winswitch's. I
am cross-posting so those who are interested can follow it up there but please
remove parti-discuss when replying as this is not related to the partiwm
project.
I hope I'm replying correctly, cc'd in case I'm not subscribed.
Now, about the use of sudo: although I understand your concerns, my goal is to
keep the instructions readable and simple.
Those like you who do not wish to run the 3 lines of shell as root should be
able to work out where (gk)sudo needs to be added instead.
I much prefer telling the user in clear steps what is going on (ie: become root) so they
can use whatever alternative they want (su, ssh, "terminal as root", etc),
rather than forcing them to use sudo 3 times. I guess it is also a matter of personal
taste.
my 2p: people who erase filesystems with typos should not have root access.
Similar story for those who do not exit the root shell.
All the instructions below must be run as root, so open a terminal and
become root:
sudo su -
Then you go on to give the commands that should be run.
Yes, but in the interests of making your instructions more readable, you have given
instructions to proceed in the "more dangerous" way.
Whilst this may not matter to experienced sys admins (who will likely skip
through them, anyway, and who will care less about the formatting),
inexperienced users are more likely to follow the instructions verbatim, and
it's them who're more likely to get in trouble.
So it kinda feels to me like you've left a loaded gun on the table, and you're telling
us, "well, those who don't know gun safety shouldn't be touching guns that people
leave lying around". It's only those who don't know any better who will put
themselves in a position to get themselves in trouble.
I think it's kinda unfair to say "people who [make mistakes] should not have root access"
considering how Linux is now a general-user operating system. Housewives and old folks install
Ubuntu on their PCs, and expect to be able to do useful things with it. Watching the WinSwitch
videos, it seems like running an app from your desktop PC to you laptop is just the kind of
"useful thing" a general end-user might wish to do - I rather understood the whole point
of WinSwitch was to make this easier and more accessible than (as experienced users might do)
exporting DISPLAY and running xpra at the command line.
It seems to me like you could avoid this debate by simply replacing:
All the instructions below must be run as root, so open a terminal and
become root:
sudo su -
Then you go on to give the commands that should be run.
with:
The following instructions below must be run in a terminal with root
privileges.
Use su or sudo with all suitable precautions.
This leaves it to the user to decide how to proceed, and the lesson on which is
best can be left to generic beginners' forums. That's a more suitable place,
and a user who doesn't know how to do each must go away and ask there in order
to have the perquisite foreknowledge before he's able to continue.
Stroller.
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