Re: Status of fab and of his pkgs [Was: ITA: man-db, groff]
[ Moving to -devel. ]
Fabrizio Polacco wrote:
> It's written everywhere: DON'T RUN MAN AS ROOT!
Tell that to a system administrator who has just booted a broken system
into single-user mode and is trying to remember how to remount the root
filesystem rw, so he can go fix the password file, which is completly
toasted. He runs man and because of his particular setup, gets some obscure
breakage instead of a man page. Since he's suspecting the system has some disk
corruption, at this point he panics.
That's not a very unlikely scenario.
Debian's man package is, at the very least, guilty of violating the
principle of least suprise. When I type "man mount", I expect to see a
man page. Sometimes you _have_no_choice_ but to run it as root, and it so it
should always work in those cases.
--
see shy jo
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