Fedora 12 to remove unprivileged package installation
Posted Nov 20, 2009 8:34 UTC (Fri) by
drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to:
Fedora 12 to remove unprivileged package installation by elanthis
Parent article:
Fedora 12 to remove unprivileged package installation
Sorry, that last post came out all retarded and stupid.
What I mean to say is that it is often very necessary to provide a
mechanism to have finer grained control over what a user is allowed to do
and not allowed to do on a operating system. Depending on the context,
depending on specific use cases, environments, and job requirements it is
necessary to lock down or open up a system in different ways.
Policykit allows administrators and users to implement 'group policies' for
the Linux desktop. By providing a centralized and manageable central
interface for this sort of thing it allows for much easier management and
avoids much of the pitfalls you run into with unmanaged (or unmanageable)
desktops.
This sort of thing can be overkill for typical desktop setups, were
something like handing over the ability to run arbitrary executions as root
willy-nilly (like Ubuntu) is a normal state of affairs, but it would be
very
nice to eliminate the need for running root for typical, everyday, and/or
mundane desktop activities.
So while it may be handy to use 'wheel' to decide what accounts are
'admins' and what are not (thus avoiding making typical users deal with
complex policy choices unless they have to). By itself it does not provide
the needed controls or mechanisms.
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