formatting/partitioning methods in HAL

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 15:47 +0100, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> As I sad above: You should only be able to format a stick if you own _all_ 
> files on this volume. This effect all filesystems with real user/group 
> permissions (excluding FAT volumes and ... (unknown)). 
> 
> Why should you be able to format a volume if you maybe not be able to delete 
> or access one, some or all files on the volume? This break all permission and 
> security concepts.

Because tons of user studies show that asking for the root pasword is
extremely unintuitive. Users don't grok it, it's that simple. 

Tell me, why on earth should the computer get in your way and yell
techno babble like "administrator password" at you, just because you
want to reformat your old USB harddisk that you used to use on Windows
XP before you switched to Fedora?

There's a fine line between what to allow and what not to allow, but I
think in a home user / corporate worker / laptop case it's pretty sane
to allow an unprivileged user at the console to format and repartition
his external USB harddisk. Some other scenarios are maybe not OK, but
this scenario definitely is.

(Oh, yea yea yea, I'm aware of the irony that most corporate workers
aren't allowed to attach external disks _at all_ because of
Sarbanes-Oxley and other fun things. Oh well)

> You must respect this part of permissions/rights ... if not you also can 
> directly do the MS Windows way: give all users root-rights (and I think 
> nobody want that because then you can use Windows instead of Linux). 

Blah, saying "but then it's like windows!" is getting old. 

D-BUS and HAL provides a very nice and secure way of allowing certain
unprivileged users to do very basic and *controlled* things through
D-BUS method invocations.

Saying this is equivalent to logging in as root or comparing it to
Windows (which I think no-one on this list really understands well
enough to make a comparison anyway) is just stupid and insulting. Both
to us (the authors of D-BUS and HAL, yourself included) and to
Microsoft.

David