At the moment a password is required for the apsync user to authorize themselves to run sudo.
I have currently left this Ubuntu default behaviour alone on the APSync images.
I don’t mind this behaviour, but I know that it annoys some people (@tridge!).
The pros of leaving it in the APSync context are simply that it makes you think the first time you run a sudo command - and, perhaps, if you’re using something like reverse-isearch that you don’t nuke your system when you inadvertently execute a nasty result.
I’m currently thinking of removing the password requirement on future versions of APSync, but I’d like some feedback from users first - positive or negative.
I suspect that if you require passwords for sudo, people will spend more time simply running things as root (sudo su -) thus givin them more opportunities to accidentally nuke the system. In particular for an “embedded” environment like a companion computer I think it’s fine to default to password-less sudo, and that’s probably the first change I would make if that were not the default.
I don’t like the idea of password-less sudo.
For me using sudo or going to root must be occasionnal and that is what normal user will expect. Most user don’t understant the differences between normal and sudo command. From my experience as noob user, I am pretty sure that passwordless sudo will lead to a mix usage of sudo and non sudo command … And user will complain that program crash or things aren’t save etc. because they previously use sudo command and can’t access files anymore.
For what do we need sudo ? Unless I miss something but nothing that is use now for apsync require sudo priviledge. I will assume that recent developpent of APWeb may need it ? In that case, isn’t it simple to grant apsync user/group permission on the related directory like what is done with other web server ?
Other point against sudo, is that ROS, that is also non-experienced user oriented, don’t provide example with sudo ! So we could have bad thing when we add ROS support (should be as soon as I got all my material to test)