-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, Nov 09, 2016 at 09:01:54AM -0500, Phil Susi wrote: > On 11/9/2016 3:43 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > I have to concur with Stefan on this. My use case is even more > > stupid -- no "real" device, but just a disk image as a file. > > > > Fdisk "just works" on that, whereas gparted... see above. > > > > With all this VM rage of late, this kind of use cases are expected > > to proliferate. It doesn't help security if random programs force > > the user to become root for no reason. > > The usefulness of a gparted on an image file without being root is near > zero. You can add or remove a partition, but can not see what > filesystems are currently in them, format a filesystem, check a > filesystem, or move a partition. All of these things require a loopback > device with dev nodes for each partition, and that requires root.
unless root has set up fstab accordingly, to name but one variant. > If you are setting up a VM disk image, what good is it to be able to > create the partition, but not format a filesystem inside it? This is a red herring. Hand-checking permissions in an application is unnecessary and is a layering violation (OS should take care of that, and it pretty well does). And... I can perfectly well mkfs.ext4 as a regular user on a block device. It's just *mount* which is special (and it's not the mount *application*, but the mount *system call*: the layering is right here). regards - -- t -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlgjNgIACgkQBcgs9XrR2kYJwgCffSVU012Xu2YXNkg2CKBnfkzx 33EAnjrfxb1XJ8NhIW1/J8o7vnnpLr8M =/8Ck -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
