low-hanging fruit

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Wed Aug 22 14:34:58 UTC 2007


On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:18:52 -0400
"Owen Taylor" <otaylor at redhat.com> wrote:

> I have a *strong* opinion here that it's *never*, *ever* right to ask
> the user a question when installing or removing a package. A question
> is going to be of the form:
> 
>  A) This operation may trash your system [detail that the user doesn't
> understand removed]. Proceed?
> 
>  B) The package that you are installing might be created by an evil
> haxor and do bad things [details that the user doesn't understand
> removed]. Proceed?

For me it's not asking the users these questions, it's asking the user
for their password to proceed (with a timeout).  OSX does this, and we
seem to base a lot of our "good usability" on what they do.  If a
friend wants to just look at their web mail, why should they switch
users to a guest account?  Why can't I just hand them the laptop and
let them use the already running browser?  If something popped up to
install software I don't want them to be able to just have it happen, I
want the password prompt to show up so that if they aren't me, or
weren't me that provided a password in the last 5 minutes, I don't want
them to be able to do it.  I don't think this is unreasonable as a
default everywhere.  It's just like we made the local user(s) sudo
enabled and rely upon that sudo mechanism to accomplish system level
tasks.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- All my bits are free, are yours?
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