Re: [PMH] Re: [Nautilus-list] Idea for Nautilus and GMC.

[Zak McGregor <zak mighty co za>]

On Thu, 24 May 2001 13:29:43 -0700
Ben Ford <ben kalifornia com> wrote:

> Dan Winship wrote:
>
> > Why are you even bothering to try to argue about this?! It's not like
> > this is unexplored territory and no one knows what will happen if we
> > try. You are proposing to give Evolution *exactly* the functionality
>
> Actually, this discussion is about Nautilus and GMC.
>
> And the only thing it does is run apps that don't have the execute bit

> set.  No more.  No less.

Yes, I think we're having a bit of a tempest in a teacup here. No
functionality is magically bestowed on a user that he/she didn't have
before. Nothing is being done without prompting for a go-ahead, which in
any case defaults to "No, don't do it". I still feel though that there
is a good opportunity here to subtly teach the end-user about the
difference between opening a data file with the appropriate app and
running an executable file. There would be not much "user-friendliness"
lost with making the action to launch executables that do not yet have
the x bit set slightly different to launching an installed app with a
data file loaded automatically.

Does rm have any mechanisms at all for disallowing the stupidest of
users running rm -rf / as root? Nope. Not even as an ordinary user.
What's the big deal? By trying to baby the users who don't know what
they're doing, we may be losing good usability in the process.

Finally, one huge difference between this situation and the Windows
scenario is usually we're not running everything with root-equivalent
permissions now are we?

Ciao

Zak

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Zak McGregor
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