Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (929 mails)

[zGreenfelder <zgreenfelder@xxxxxxxxx>]

throwing my hat in cuz I'm bored at work, I guess.

> Doesn't sound like you understand the gist of that thread. Running a program
> as root is a common test and troubleshoot procedure. If an ordinary user
> can't do something but root can, the problem is usually one of permissions.

right.  a common -troubleshooting- action.  if $user can not run
$program, try as root; perhaps permissions are wrong.
it is -not- a typical operation mode; root permissions should be
limited to those few places where really necessary..

> Conversely, in a new system a lot of time is saved by creating user(s) only
> after knowing the system works suitably. Absent recompilation, VLC does not
> permit these standard practices.

it is a -very- standard practice to either refuse to run as root or to
become another user in the background to drop root permissions, if
$program is doing actions that could have serious security
problems/negative impacts on a machine/doing actions that aren't from
completely trusted source.   that is actually the gist of the thread
you pointed to.

if 'a lot of time is saved' by not creating users, you're probably
trying to create users in a wrong way and the fact that you're so
eager to leave root user logged into a running system (albeit in a
semi secured, home environment) makes me think you don't really grasp
security implications and/or best practices for what you're doing.

I think that by requiring people to compile the code to run as root,
vlc (and opensuse in this particular case) is ensuring a minimum level
of technical competence for dealing with the potential problems/issues
that can arise from running a video decoding/viewing process as root.
 I don't think this is an unreasonable approach to take and they've
probably saved themselves far more users angry about '$torrent_video
did $bad_thing to my machine!!!' than they've created by disallowing
root by default.

> OTOH, SMplayer doesn't impose this rather unique limitation.

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