Root and Wayland

[Tomaz Canabrava]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Miika Turkia <miika.turkia at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 12:31 PM, Martin Měřinský <mermar at centrum.cz>
> wrote:
> > Hello.
> > These days more and more distributions are using Wayland. Last Ubuntu
> > e.g. AFAIK Wayland design feature is that UI applications are not
> > allowed to run as root.
> >
> > From Subsurface manual: "If you are not root, you may not be a member
> > of that group and won’t be able to use the USB port." Well, if you are
> > root, you cannot run Subsurface under Wayland at all(?) Fortunately
> > it's not necessary, but output doesn't look good.
>
> We do not recommend running Subsurface as root and try to get users to
> configure their system so that root is not needed (i.e. adding
> themselves to the dialout group). That is the whole purpose of the
> specific chapter in user manual. But this sentence should be reworded
> to make it clear that user should set the groups properly and not run
> Subsurface as root.
>
> > I would humbly suggest to detect Wayland and root privileges, show
> > better command line message and quit.
> > Or fix it somehow like GParted 0.30.0 did?
> > Maybe we should mention it in the manual.
>
> There should not be any reason to run Subsurface as root, no matter
> whether Wayland or not. So any attempt to run with root privileges
> should result in an error message. But in Wayland's case it might be
> better not to mention the allow_run_as_root option at all (or tell the
> xhost cmdline).
>
> > Also --allow_run_as_root option is not mentioned in subsurface --help
> > output nor in the manual.
>
>
perhaps we should remove that, period.

I am not sure if this should be documented or not. Running software as
> root is generally a bad idea, so documenting how to do that sounds a
> bit contradictory to me.
>
> miika
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