Bug#374685: nautilus-cd-burner: fails to call cdrecord properly

[Joerg Schilling]

Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org> wrote:

> Le jeudi 22 juin 2006 à 14:43 +0200, Joerg Schilling a écrit :
> > If you did read the mail from the OP, you would know that cdrecord was not
> > running as root or suid root at least in one example. Note that cdrecord
> > _needs_ root privilleges in order work correctly.
>
> A CD burning program needing root privileges to work correctly is
> obviously broken. Privileges are handled by device permissions, not by
> making setuid root any kind of badly written software in the world. For
> example, dvd+rw-tools doesn't need root privileges to work correctly.

If you really believe this, you are obviously missing the needed background 
information.

When you compare against classical UNIX/POSIX privileges, cdrecord needs the 
following privileges in addition to the UNIX/POSIX basic privs:

-	The ability to open privileged device nodes

-	The ability to issue several privileged device ioctl()s

-	The ability to lock into memory

-	The ability to control (raise) process priority

-	The ability to use port numbers below 1024

As Linux does not implement a framework that allows a process to obtain these
privileges without being root, it is obvious that cdrecord need to be run by 
root or to be installed suid root.
 

> > I did receive enough reports from frustrated Debian users (including the 
> > k3b authors) to know that there _is_ a problem with the Debian variant of 
> > cdrecord that prevents it working properly. This problem is not present in the 
> > original version of cdrecord.
>
> Sorry, but Debian only ships free software.

You are obviously missinformed: Debian refuses to ship free software.

Cdrecord is obviously OSI approved free/OSS software, please try to inform 
yourself.... 

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily