[Sugar-devel] [PATCH 2/2] disabling become root button

[Gary Martin]

On 20 May 2011, at 22:29, Sascha Silbe <silbe at activitycentral.com> wrote:

> Excerpts from Rafael Ortiz's message of Thu May 19 18:52:59 +0200 2011:
> 
>> Temporaly Disabling become root button on terminal activity 
>> avoiding problems reported  SL#2756 and #2597, also in merge request on gitorious 
> 
> CC'ing Gary and Walter to discuss the UI side of this.
> As discussed in both tickets [1,2] we might want to get rid of this
> button permanently - at least in its current form. It's dangerous
> (kills the currently running process(es)) and just a shorthand for
> "su -".
> 
> While getting rid of the button without any replacement would make root
> access less easy to discover, I'd argue that without a minimal
> introduction the shell functionality is equally "hard" to discover. The
> same minimal introduction (/etc/motd?) could mention "sudo -i".

Some back story. I seem to remember an awful lot of OLPC email support and wiki churn with novice folks struggling with root access before this button was added. It didn't help that some builds used su and some used sudo, confusing text instructions (and there seems to have been a non standard command added to OLPC builds just called 'root'). The kind of tasks very novice console users were trying to accomplish in terminal were things like olpc-update, trying to get Flash installed, installing various unsupported codecs (mp3 being the obvious one), trying to yum install some package that someone else suggested will provide feature X or fix bug Y. Scarily folks were usually just following text from wiki pages, mail-lists, web forum, with little understanding of what they were typing. Adding the "become root" button seemed to cut down support churn (but I doubt improved understanding).

Perhaps the button could instead open a new tab as a privileged user to avoid the mentioned tickets? I'm on the fence about just removing the feature, but maybe it was more a G1G1 issue that triggered the need for it.

--Gary

> [terminal.py]
>> @@ -86,17 +86,17 @@ class TerminalActivity(activity.Activity):
>>         tab_toolbar_button.show()
>> 
>>         # Add a button that will be used to become root easily.
>> -        root_button = ToolButton('activity-become-root')
>> -        root_button.set_tooltip(_('Become root'))
> [...]
>> +        #root_button = ToolButton('activity-become-root')
>> +        #root_button.set_tooltip(_('Become root'))
> [...]
> 
> Please just remove the lines. If we want to bring them back later, we
> can just revert the patch. That's what a VCS is for after all.
> 
> Sascha
> 
> [1] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2597
> [2] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2756
> -- 
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/