Matthew Miller <mattdm <at> mattdm.org> writes:
> Tell the user "sudo ifconfig". It's better than having them "su -" and *does
> the right thing the right way*. (Although arguably ifconfig is one of the
> commands that could be moved to /bin -- it's one of the few tricky cases so
> it's a bad example.)
The problem is that sudo doesn't work out of the box, it needs manual
configuration.
If someone taught sudo to prompt for the root password if the user is not in
sudoers, maybe even using consolehelper, so the password gets cached, your
suggestion would become a serious one. But in the current state, it's just a
PITA to teach a newbie (and the fact that there is a warning at the top
of /etc/sudoers not to edit it with anything other than visudo and vi being a
major usability disaster doesn't help - of course you can override EDITOR for
visudo or even ignore the huge warning and just use kwrite as root to edit it,
but the mere existence of that warning, with no instructions on how to use an
editor other than vi, is still very newbie-unfriendly), so newbie-friendly
instructions use su instead. Using sudo also reduces security (as only the user
password is needed to get root access, not the root password).
The problem is that sudo tries to be a helpful tool, but fails horribly at it.
Kevin Kofler
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