There seems to be an assumption that everybody is a 'power user' and
knows exactly what they are doing.
The reality is not like that at all.
Leaving nasty surprises for the unwary and inexperienced is at worst
malicious and at best incompetent.
I would guess that most of us here have googled for the answer to some
programming or scripting conundrum, and how many stackoverflow etc
answers did you have to go through to find an answer that was correct?
Far too many.
Now imagine the poor sod new to all this... It is most emphatically not
gross neglect on the part of the user.

And don't get me started on RTFM!
If I knew where the authors of some crappy man pages lived I would burn
their house down.

DaveT

On 03/02/16 21:39, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
> Steve Litt <slitt@???> writes:
>> Rainer Weikusat <rainerweikusat@???> wrote:
>>
>>> There are really only two options:
>>>

>>> 1. Don't mount or mount r/o and require user interfaction prior to
>>>     working with these variables.

>>>

>>> 2. Mount r/w and expect people messing around with the fs as superuser
>>>     to know what they're doing.
> [another misused analogy]

>
>> In a Poettering/UEFI world, railings are all less than 2 feet high,
>> high rise picture windows are large and low, mountain roads have no
>> guard rails on curves, bridge abutments have no sand barrels in front
>> of them, and people who draw blood don't wear rubber gloves. We all
>> know what we're doing, and if something goes wrong, we deserve what we
>> get.
> None of these statements is applicable to the situation. This was about
> first intentionally executing a command supposed to delete everything
> accessible via any some mounted filesystem and then 'discovering'
> that this command deleted some things which should rather have been
> kept. Executing such a command without knowing which filesystems are
> mounted and how this will affect the state of the machine is not "an
> unfortunate accident" but simply gross neglect.
>
> Regarding the different-but-related issue of 'buggy software' causing
> the deletion, there should be a prominent "policy choice" to prevent any
> modification of 'EFI variables' unless a user specifically oks
> that. That's also something where the "systemd responses" of "our
> convenience beats your hardware" (as we make the descisions) is clearly
> wanting. But that's because users are supposed to be in control of their
> hardware/ software and not because random morons "want to watch GNOME
> die".
>
>
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