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  • Nate Graham's avatar
    Re-allow running the app with sudo · 1f02e3ca
    Nate Graham authored
    Three years ago, dolphin was prevented from being run with `sudo` or as
    the root user in
    system/dolphin@0bdd8e0b.
    The justification was to protect users from a security threat described in
    utilities/kate@9adcebd3.
    
    Since then, we have received a large number of user complaints. We have
    always told them the same thing: that they won't need to run dolphin with
    sudo anyway once PolKit support for KIO is merged, as it was for Kate.
    
    Unfortunately PolKit in KIO never got merged. It remains stuck, three
    years later. See https://phabricator.kde.org/D7563 for the latest
    status. So we are in the situation where we took away a feature before
    its replacement was ready, and then we repeatedly promised that the
    replacement would be ready soon, and it never was.
    
    This represents a severe breach of trust for our users. I know that
    running Dolphin with sudo is not something anybody recommends, but
    taking away the feature before its replacement was ready using the
    justification that we were protecting users from themselves is something
    that I can totally understand people being upset about. Deleting the
    threatened feature is not an appropriate way to resolve a security threat.
    Linus Torvalds feels similarly: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/21/356
    
    Accordingly, this reverts the commit to disallow running Dolphin with sudo.
    Once PolKit in kio is merged, we can revert this commit and dis-allow it
    again before its replacement is actually released and available.
    
    This only applies to X; on Wayland all GUI apps are already unconditionally
    prevented from running as the root user at the compositor level.
    1f02e3ca