On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:18:52 -0400
"Owen Taylor" <otaylor(a)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?