Fedora 12 Package Installation Policy Tightened

AdamWill writes "After the controversy over Fedora 12's controversial package installation authentication policy, including our discussion this week, the package maintainers have agreed that the controversial policy will be tightened to require root authentication for trusted package installation. Please see the official announcement and the development mailing list post for more details."

Comments

Re:At the risk of being flamed to hell

[jedidiah]

This is just nonsense, TOTAL NONSENSE.

Unix users have ALWAYS had the ability to install applications into their own home directory. Ok, so it (maybe) never occured to the authors of Linux package managers to target the users home directory. However, the fact remains that the ability/possibility has always been there. You simply don't need to pollute the system files in order to "install an app" on Unix. That is one of it's key strengths.

This is why the Fedora guys got skewered.

Some of us have been "installing applications" in our home directories since before the first line of Linux was written.

To quote Richard Hughes:

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote Richard Hughes, the developer responsible for the braindeadness in the first place, and repeatedly trying to brag his competency of being a dickhead in the bugzilla(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=534047).:

Every time somebody writes "Linux is about choice" something inside of me dies. Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.

Source: http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/09/23/linux-is-about-choice/

It seems that he interpreted his own words as "Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it. But for me, I can fucking make whatever 'choice' and screw everybody else. Bwahahaha!"

And his recent rants:

And so, long story short, we decided to revert the change for F12.

Part of being an open source maintainer (and also my job at Red Hat) is to ignore trolls, but some of the messages I was getting yesterday were just personal attacks and abuse. That’s not cricket at all.

(Source: http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/11/20/the-fedora-12-installing-saga/)

But he was the one who was being a troll first. Quotes from the bugzilla:

• "It's not insecure. We've had the mechanism checked. The default policy may not be to your taste, but this is the "desktop" spin, not the "server" spin. " (btw, the two "spins" don't actually exist. --ed)
• "There's nothing to discuss here."
• "You either trust the Fedora repos or you don't."
• "I don't particularly care how UNIX has always worked."
• "You missed the "in my opinion" line in your reply."
• "There are other, *easier*, ways of rooting the system. "

Now, I'm wondering how on earth did someone got a job for being a devtroll. Red Hat pays him to develop, but trolling the bugzilla? I don't remember anyone "attacking him personally" on the bugzilla. I wasn't following the mailing lists though.

And he now seemed hurt because the users actually bothered to donate their own time correcting his mistake.

Grow up.