This one time, at band camp, Paul Johnson said: > On Sunday 23 March 2008 10:53:15 am Justin Pryzby wrote: > > > This patch explicit statement that there is a time limit; without > > this, users are likely to reread the huge warning rather than quickly > > aborting/suspending the process to investigate. > > With something as grave as removing the root account, wouldn't it make much > more sense to ask for explicit confirmation to be entered and wait > indefinitely until that happens, similar to what you must do in dpkg or apt > if you try to remove base required packages? adduser/deluser sometimes get > called by apt themselves, possibly while the operator who called it has > abandoned their console to go get coffee or take care of some other task.
This bug is mostly harmless when deluser is called without a foolish flag like --remove-home or worse, --remove-all-files. It is possible, of course, to say "no, you can't ever do that", but I do feel a little uncomfortable second guessing an admin who wants to do something drastically stupid - unix doesn't generally do that. I agree that the harm caused by allowing people to effectively ask for removal of the root account and all files that are uid 0 is stupid, so what I propose is: allow removal of a uid 0 account, provided the username is not root. Also, fail before doing anything if either of --remove-home or --remove-all-files is given. Seem reasonable? -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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