#6316 HIGH Never A: become_root is broken.

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#6316: become_root is broken.
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  Reporter:  cscott  |       Owner:  mstone        
      Type:  defect  |      Status:  new           
  Priority:  high    |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
 Component:  distro  |     Version:                
Resolution:          |    Keywords:                
  Verified:  0       |    Blocking:  5537          
 Blockedby:          |  
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Changes (by mstone):

 * cc: AlbertCahalan, cscott, holt, eben, mstone (added)


Comment:

 The current implementation was designed to:

   1. Ease the support-gang's instruction-writing problem.
   2. Make the root evironment directly discoverable through the Sugar UI.
   3. Ensure that commands being run as root are run in an environment with
 an appropriate value for $PATH.
   4. Write 'become_root' so that it is compatible with all of the 650,
 Update.1, and Joyride environments.
   5. Avoid the political stalemate that existed between 'su' supporters
 and 'sudo' supporters.
   6. Add an extra layer of indirection so we can change what mechanism is
 used to become root (or to run commands as uid 0) without rewriting
 support documentation.

 These requirements were elicited primarily from conversations with Adam
 Holt and from my experience with olpc-update 1.0, in which changes in
 environment variables (particularly PATH) caused by people using plain
 'su' instead of 'su -' led to innumerable UI failures.

 Now that sugar-control-panel depends on SUGAR_PATH, we have basically come
 full circle. I recommend fixing this either by removing sugar-control-
 panel's dependence on this environment variable (e.g. by specifying an
 appropriate default) or by setting SUGAR_PATH in the default root
 environment provided by 'su -'.

 Scott: how would you suggest making 'su' or 'sudo' discoverable?

 P.S. - I'm likely to be away for a few days do to unavoidable family
 obligations. Please make appropriate modifications (subject to these
 requirements) to olpc-utils (which owns 'become_root') and to Terminal.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6316#comment:6>
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