Evan Martin (evan) wrote in evan_tech,
Evan Martin
evan
evan_tech

running as root

We've had a surprising number of bugs reported against Chrome by people running as root. For example, running via sudo doesn't change $HOME so all of your $HOME/.config files end up owned by root and unreadable by your normal user. We (sensibly, I hope you'll agree) haven't much tested that because it's a bad idea, but that doesn't convince people to not file bugs. Consider for example this fellow, who inexplicably suggests you set up a shortcut to run via sudo without giving a reason for it.

I've been tempted to just make the thing refuse to run as root but the counterargument is that it's the unix way to let you do dumb things if you want to. What do you think?
Tags: chromium, linux
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  • 18 comments

  • blog moved

    As described elsewhere, I've quit LiveJournal. If you're interested in my continuing posts, you should look at one of these (each contains feed…

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    They published a paper on Dremel, my favorite previously-unpublished tool from the Google toolchest. Greg Linden discusses it: "[...] it is capable…

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