Re: Please, don't let sudo be auto-removable
Hi José,
On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 07:47:35PM +0200, José Esteban wrote:
> Is it realistic to hope you to remember such many little things like this
> each time you setup some system ?
Yes, that is part of the administrator's job. That and many other little
details, including reading command output when you issue a packaging
command as root. There is no getting around having to know and remember
things but on a case by case basis we can suggest tools to make life
easier.
You've already been advised about apt-mark.
Another common practice in systems administration is the idea of
configuration management. You express desired system state and the
configuration management tool puts the system into that state. "I want
sudo installed" wuld be part of that state. Examples of popular
configuration management tools that support Debian are Ansible, Chef and
Puppet. Others exist.
I don't think there would ever be a way to avoid having to carefully
check things you do as root though! We have all been there with a
careless command.
> How many headless systems usually work without sudo ?
Mine have a variant of sudo but I expect there are several large
corporations that between them have hundreds of millions of servers
without sudo, and thousands of administrators who have gone their whole
working life without ever using or wanting sudo.
> I'm worked a whole life making software and I've always acted to ease my
> users' life... but may be just me.
Fact is you only got sudo installed on your system because some other
software you installed depended upon it. Please explain how Debian is
supposed to know that you actually want it independently of that other
software? At the moment your argument is, "I always use sudo so Debian
should just know."
Usage of sudo is not as widespread as you think.
Your suggestion to make it essential would force it to be present on
everyone's Debian. I guarantee there would be more complaints about that
than yours.
I will point out again that people on this mailing list have no
authority whatsoever in Debian. It is very possible that someone sent
you here to complain about this as a means for you to blow off steam with
no actual change happening in the world. We aren't the ones you have to
convince, but possibly you have been sent here to just debate it. Or
else there is some misunderstanding about why you were pointed at
debian-user.
> Thanks for the response; I'll try to remember to apt-mark sudo as manual
> installed next time.
Automation exists for when you want it. No more need to remember
apt-mark or countless other little details, but the price is having to
learn about the whole world of configuration management!
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Reply to: