On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 04:08:26PM +0100, Susanne Oberhauser wrote: > Nevertheless would you agree with me that for systmes claiming to run on > *Linux*, relying on the existence of a user 'root' should be ok? This > would allow portable software to have just *one* platform specific backend > for *all* flavors of Linux, and would ease porting of such software to > Linux.
Certainly, a program which is not expected to work on anything but an LSB-compliant system can make this assumption, and many others. But in this specific case, it is (in many cases) in fact easier to check for uid=0 than username="root" anyway, and in general, there are relatively few cases where it makes sense to test for root privileges rather than something more specific. With the continuing development and proliferation of more fine-grained access control systems for Linux, root will become less magic, and could be removed or assigned reduced privileges. -- - mdz
