Re: Susu and Rum patch for coreutils-5.2.1

[Alpt]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 09:24:06AM +0100, <James Youngman>:
~> On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 05:55:55PM +0200, Alpt wrote:
~> 
~> > The second patch is rum.
~> > You can directly read the readme here:
~> > http://www.freaknet.org/alpt/src/utils/rum/
~> > 
~> > With the rum patch, rm will look at /etc/rm.conf and ~/.rm.conf, it will 
load a
~> > list of protected files and directories, and it will not delete them.
~> > To force the deletion of a protected entry the -ff option must be used.
~> > (ex: rm -rff /etc).
~> > I could't test the ROOT_CAN_UNLINK_DIRS case.
~> 
~> This strikes me as about as useful as
~> 
~>         alias rm="rm -i"

I agree with you, "rm -i" is totally useless, because after some time you'll 
type 'y'
mechanically without ever thinking about it. It's not a solution, it's a delay
which gives you false confidence.

~> In my opinion it's
~> not such a great idea to have a feature that users come to rely on
~> from doing something unfortunate, unless that feature is available
~> everywhere.  Quite a number of years ago I typed "rm -rf /tmp/ *".  My
~> working directory was /.  That was a learning experience.

Yes, it's true, it's a learning experience.
But, have you ever made the same mistake a second time?

And a third time?

Well, maybe it's too much, but keep in mind that in uneasy situation it's too
easy to make the same stupid error you would never do when all goes well.

Recently two of my friends lost their /etc and /var, but they lived in *nix for
5 years.

Ok, let's rephrase it: if you crashed with your car and you're still alive then,
even if you are experienced, you can still crash with it. no? eheh ^_.

So one solution is to forbid the user to rm the directory, but this is a
restrictive and blind solution.

So why don't let the user keep a list of important directories or files ?
It's just an handy option, the user can decide to use it or not, and surely it
doesn't protect him totally because there are so many ways to smash the own
machine, but at least it's better than nothing :)

Just a protection
-- 
:wq!
"I don't know nothing" The One Who reached the Thinking Matter   '.'

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