[arch-general] coping with damaging updates

[C Anthony Risinger]

On 10/27/2011 12:14 PM, Martti Kühne wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Leonid Isaev<lisaev at umail.iu.edu>  wrote:
>>
>> OK, which update you are talking about?
>>
>> Shutdown problems probably come from upower. Your user would loose control of
>> external devices only if you were in the storage/disk groups. Adding youself to
>> these groups was your mistake, since unless you understand what you are doing,
>> you should let console-kit do the permission granting. In fact, on a modern
>> linux system you only have to be a member of 1 group: users.
>>
>> How do you start your desktop and do you have ck-launch-session running?
>>
>
>
> Personally I'm not using neither gui file browser nor consolekit
> session and make use of the group based permission because I know how
> to handle things, and I can look up eventual barriers in my way
> quickly and reliably enough. I mount usb drives manually and generally
> lay hands on my system to keep things running, I mean, in a sane way.
> This is the first time I hear that this way of treating things would
> be discouraged, and I'm asking myself if this is just a sysadmin's
> gripe and if it will be possible in the future. Let's say I'm pretty
> sure it will be possible, since I guess I'm not the only one who
> avoids these additional sources of errors aka. software layers like
> ck/dbus/stuff. I left $certain-other-distro for some reason, and don't
> want to be forced back on this layer cake again.

the sources of error are likely not a thin smear of software that, imo, 
makes the entire experience much better and enables fine-grained access 
control ... i mean group perms are nice and all, but they are incredibly 
coarse, and over the years have forced all sorts of odd/convoluted 
application hierarchies + access patterns to cope.

unfortunately, error sources are probably human, ie. stuff isn't being 
launched/ran/used properly.  the stack is layers -- i for one think the 
linux experience has improved 1000 fold over the last few years alone -- 
and we continue to demand more, albeit indirectly at times.

> Also reminds me of this morning's xorg-xdm bug report I wrote which
> made dbus on a system level necessary, all of a sudden... Things go on
> like this and I'll remove my Xorg and run frambuffer only from now on.
> :-)

doubtful ;-).  im a professional sysadmin too ATM (though, i'm 
traditionally an applications developer, and am trying my hand at larger 
scale administration), and honestly, i'd like to see dbus and other 
tools that enhance discovery/transparency/communication/free-time embed 
themselves like a tick in everything possible.  this idea of actually 
*wanting* to micromanage everything makes me shudder ... yuck ... the 
cleanest fastest version with a healthy scoop of Just Works beats 
uber-unnecessary flexibility any day in my book.

there are more interesting problems to solve than helping my computer be 
a computer.

-- 
C Anthony Risinger