On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 05:53 -0400, Alan Cox wrote: > On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 08:27:18PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote: > > I agree with you, fwiw. Any reason to need to log in as root is a bug. > > Then gdm is a bug 8) You need root login when things like ldap go away otherwise > you can't login. A lot of sites using LDAP probably also use NFS (or otherwise networked) home directories, and so if you can't contact the LDAP server, you're unlikely to be able to get to the NFS server either, and thus you don't have any access to your data. So what use is it to log in as root? Besides, giving one's users root access to their machines to make up for one's inability to set up a reliable, replicated LDAP setup is probably a bad idea :) Now, if you're talking about something like laptops: John Dennis and Dan Reed were working a while back on fixing this. The idea is that the first time you log in, your credentials are cached. If the network is unreachable, then your login is verified against cached credentials. > When you can fix gdm to automatically switch to telepathy mode > let me know. Similarly if the system develops problems and you need to boot > to single user you need root. That doesn't really count as "login". I don't think anyone was suggesting to disable single user mode out of the box.
