formatting/partitioning methods in HAL

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 15:07 +0100, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> On Sunday 15 January 2006 06:48, Christopher Santero wrote:
> > I'm interested in implementing the formatting and parititioning
> > methods David talks about in this Gnome bug:
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309067
> >
> [...]
> > Does that sound correct, and am I missing anything?
> 
> I see the big problem of security and permissions to format a volume. For a 
> CD/DVD or a floppy (and maybe also a USB-Stick, but not complete sure) we 
> could allow the user to format a volume, but for a harddisk? 

I agree we have to do this very carefully.

> I don't think so - for this you should need root-user rights. A user should 
> not be able to reformat (and delete data) a volume if he not own _all_ files 
> and dirs on the volume (and IMO the same for a USB-disk). IMO any other 
> solution would be never acceptable.

Why not? If the policy was made sufficiently secure by default, and
there was a HOWTO for users to follow to make things work for their
username, why not?

Locking it down to media that <1Gb in size, with only one partition, and
not a hard-disk would probably cover all the things we would easily try
to format.

My opinion is that a user shouldn't have to go to the root user, just to
format a floppy or a pendrive.

Richard.