[Manoj Srivastava] > > We're not talking about sabotage, we're talking about extra effort. > > Not really an answer I expected from a DD.
I don't mind putting in extra effort when there is some gain to be had. I'm not so excited about putting in extra effort when there is no gain to be had. I'm still waiting for the answer to why it is so important that users be able to build our packages as root. So far all I'm hearing is "what if I can't be bothered to create a non-root user" which, to me, just doesn't sound very compelling. > Offering options to users does add to th quality of > implementation, just as fixing bugs or writing man pages does. You mean offering options to users who want to rebuild packages we already provide for them. That would be a set of users who already went to a certain amount of trouble to set up a chroot and 'apt-get build-dep' inside the chroot. (If they aren't building in a chroot, the argument about 'adduser' doesn't really hold up.) I just don't see a lot of value in saving those users from the two extra steps of calling 'adduser foo' and 'su foo'. > Your argument seems to be that doing anything else for debian or > one's packages apart from bug fixing or writing man pages is a waste > of time -- so, to please you, should we just mass file bugs so you > can happily fix them while allowing root to build packages? :) :) If I ever run short on real bugs to fix, I'll let you know. (: Seriously, of course I care about quality of implementation, I just don't see how the ability to build as root is particularly necessary to any user under any circumstances. As such, it seems like a waste of time to go out of one's way to support it. > mailagent has a series of tests it runs that fail when run as root, > so for about a decade now mailagent has detected that it is running > as root, and then su's to a non-root user to run the tests. So I guess that assumes there's a handy non-root user that could have been used to build the package in the first place. So much for _that_ counter-argument, then.
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