[Adduser-devel] Bug#472349: adduser: please delay more than 5 seconds during deluser root

[Paul Johnson]

Pardon the intrusion, I feel I need to speak up on this issue.  I feel that 
waiting on an interval before continuing instead of human confirmation on 
removal of important role accounts is not failsafe behavior.   I also suspect 
this could probably be merged with #470464.

On Sunday 23 March 2008 10:53:15 am Justin Pryzby wrote:

> This patch explicit statement that there is a time limit; without
> this, users are likely to reread the huge warning rather than quickly
> aborting/suspending the process to investigate.

With something as grave as removing the root account, wouldn't it make much 
more sense to ask for explicit confirmation to be entered and wait 
indefinitely until that happens, similar to what you must do in dpkg or apt 
if you try to remove base required packages?  adduser/deluser sometimes get 
called by apt themselves, possibly while the operator who called it has 
abandoned their console to go get coffee or take care of some other task.  

This has probably come to surprise more than just me thanks to bug #469165.

-- 
Paul Johnson
baloo at ursine.ca
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