sudo vs su in wineinstall

[n0dalus]

On 1/30/06, Tom Spear (Dustin Booker, Dustin Navea)
<speeddymon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys, bug 4439 describes a problem where a machine (running ubuntu)
> does not install wine when using wineinstall due to the fact that su dos
> not work..
>
> Just a couple of questions:
>
> Is this the case (su not working) on all Ubuntu machines, or just
> something broken on that users' machine?

I think Ubuntu comes without a set root password. This is to try to
dumb down the idea of having a root user (just my take on it).

> If it is the case on all Ubuntu machines, the user has mentioned that
> sudo does work.  sudo does require configuration prior to being used,
> but we could always add into the wineinstall script to configure sudo
> for the user, or we could ask the user to configure it themself, OR we
> could fall back to using su if the user answers no to having used
> sudo..  see below:

Configuring or requiring an allow-everything sudo for people is a bad
idea, as it weakens security on the machine.

What would be much better and simpler for the user, is if you had to
start the wineinstall script as root (using su, sudo, whatever is
appropriate for the distribution/setup) and it would run a seperate
process as a non-root user to perform the compiling, etc, and bits
that need root would be run by the wineinstall script directly.

n0dalus.