On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 04:25:59PM +0200, Tomasz Torcz wrote:

[cut]

>
> So it would be sensible to ask for root password IF there are other
> (remote) users logged in. If there is no one logged in, shutdown/reboot
> should be possible without entering root password.
> Above heuristic could be default, with additional setting available
> to always/never require root password to shutdown.
>

If I can contribute 2 pence to this prolonged discussion, I would
point out that deciding who and how has the ability to shut-down or
reboot a given machine is something that pertains to the *policy*
decided by the administrator of that machine. Login managers and other
amenities could (or should, according to some of you) provide the
*mechanism* to shut down and reboot a machine, but cannot and should
not enforce any policy at all about shutting down and rebooting.

The reason for that is the same that has produced this prolonged
thread: there cannot be any agreement about policies, since everybody
has his/her own vision of how his/her computer should behave, and all
of them are *correct*.

There is a very good explanation to why Unix has been successful in
the last 45 years: it has provided *mechanisms*, and a lot of them,
for basically any possible operation you might be willing to do on
your system, even those which the original creators did not have a
clue about. But it has always avoided to enforce any *policy*,
i.e. precise ways in which those mechanish have to be used to make
sense. Why? Simply because there is a potentially infinite number of
policies (and you will realise that if you think that unix flavors
currently run on anything, from microcontrollers to supercomputers)
and no single size will fit them all.

Software should provide mechanisms, and as many and as variegate as
possible, but making sense of mechanisms and composing them into
policies is the role of the system administrator. The large majority
of seasoned unix users and admins would agree that anything that
defies this simple principle is totally against the unix phylosophy,
and that any discussion that prescinds this simple principle will
never converge to an agreement.

My2Pence

KatolaZ

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