Make consolehelper more liske sudo?

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 04:19:52PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> >I don't consider date/time to be "end user". That should be managed through
> >ntp, which shouldn't be just tweaked at the whim of whoever sits down at the
> >box. (Setting the *user's* timezone is a different issue.)
> You need to be able to change timezone when traveling. User may also not
> be on a network so you cannot rely on a NTP server.

You shouldn't have to change the *system* timezone, though.

$ echo $TZ
America/New_York
$ date
Thu Mar  3 16:34:40 EST 2005
$ export TZ=Japan
$ date
Fri Mar  4 06:35:17 JST 2005

Personally, I think the system timezone should *always* be GMT, and local
time always set per-user. (There could be a system default TZ, of course.)
But that's a different discussion. :)



>  o Why should installing updates and software that is *signed*
>    by a key that the admin chooses to trust require root?

Because it could affect other users in unpredictable ways.

>  o IIRC you can already install "software" as a non-privileged user
>    for e.g. Firefox - my point is that there is more to installing
>    software than just RPM

Right -- that's okay, because privilege separation reduces the possible
impact on others.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>