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

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Thomas C Gilliard <
satellit at bendbroadband.com> wrote:

>
>
> Rafael Ortiz wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Sascha Silbe <silbe at activitycentral.com> <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".
>
>
>
>
>
>  Thanks for the review Sasha, I also think we will need further introductions
> on how to become root, although at this moment I don't know how to add this
> from the activity itself without having a mod on the os, IIRC olpc's term
> had this info along with a ''welcome children of the world'' intro ,
> although dextrose don't. (I might be wrong though), ideas welcomed.
>
>
>  Also It does not work in ubuntu based sugar distros where "sudo su" is
> required
>
>    [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.
>
> Right!.
>
>
>     Sascha
>
> [1] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2597
> [2] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2756
> --http://sascha.silbe.org/http://www.infra-silbe.de/
>
>        ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing listSugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.orghttp://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>  +1

I am not a fan of the button. The bottom line is that anyone who is doing
something that requires root access should presumably be comfortable typing
su on the command line.

That said, we should think about the class of things we want kids to do
without having to be root, such as modify Sugar, and how to make those
things easier. (For example, I am experimenting with a view-source patch
that will offer to copy an activity but since we don't have view source
available for Sugar itself yet, it would be require copying
site-packages/sugar and jarabe to $HOME and modifying sys.path to make
changes without root access.)

regards.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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