On Thursday 19 Nov 2015 12:48:50 Andrew Haley wrote:
On 11/18/2015 06:49 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
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Phrased another way: no, it's not *your computer* we're talking about here. The computer in question rightfully belongs to someone else; we are here discussing how to be responsible for the code they allow us to run on it.
That is a reasonable point for view. However, the point of Free Software is freedom; and the ability to shoot oneself in the foot is part of that freedom. One of the greatest advantage of Free Software from my point of view is that people can choose. And I know that I am not alone in chooing to use (and to write) Free Software for that reason: freedom is not just about strict licence compliance.
Five years or so ago I publicly defended Wayland because I was assured that things would continue to work after the transition. Being able to edit files with emacs is an essential part of that "continuing to work."
I don't see how a lack of access to the GUI when running as root will prevent Emacs from editing root-owned files.
TRAMP (if you wish to stay inside emacs) and "sudo -e" (if you'd rather work outside emacs) both provide mechanisms (that I use today under X11) for emacs to edit root-only files while the vast bulk of emacs runs as my user ID.
Put another way: "sudo emacs /etc/hosts" will break under Wayland. "sudo -e /etc/hosts", "emacsclient /sudo::/etc/hosts" and "emacs /sudo::/etc/hosts" will all still work as they do today, as will "emacs --eval (find-file /sudo::/etc/hosts)"