On 14/12/99 Svante Signell wrote:
Potato does use PAM, at least in part, so it would be possible to port usermode, though it wouldn't be trivial, as Debian doesn't seem to be currently using the pam-console part of PAM which is used to give special privileges to users logged in at the console.
if debian does decide to port pam_console (which i have found to be exceedingly buggy on redhat) I would hope that all the nasty permissions changing on /dev/* files would be OFF by default. as well as the privilege to shutdown/reboot (and the half dozen other root tasks redhat gives away be default). such things are and should be the decision of the local sysadmin. please do not add more work to the install process to disable all these `features'.
not to say there should not be an option to easily allow users to perform some tasks normally restricted to root only, I just think it should not be the default. (or maybe its better to make it a debconf question: promiscuous root? [y/N])
Ethan