Root login in rawhide and display managers

[Rahul Sundaram]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 20:56 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 19:42 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> What is significantly different between the situation 
>>> a secretary in an office desktop writing texts/browsing the web etc. is
>>> in and those of your Grandmother/ your 10 year old son doing the same
>>> @home?
>>>
>>> None. In both situations you will need a sysadmin.
>> I don't see either situations needing a sysadmin. My grandmother does 
>> her work on her computer without requiring any sysadmin interaction for 
>> the kind of routine tasks you refer to.
> C'mon, you are really being rediculous.

This is not a argument.

>>>>>> Majority of updates are backported patches to maintain ABI compatibility.
>>> Irrelevant from a desktop USER's POV.
>>>
>>> To them, what matters is "their application simply works".
>> Correct but the technical difference and the impact on the differences 
>> between the roles they provide still stand. One example of the impact of 
>> ABI compatibility is with ISV applications.
> ISV apps != RHEL desktop.

RHEL desktop has ISV applications and an important technical feature 
enabling that to happen is ABI compatibility. I wasn't talking about any 
one product. This applies to Windows as well.

>>  In this instance, you can't 
>> expect them to simply work in any distribution without an additional 
>> explicit effort.
> 1. We talked about desktops and freedom, not about ISVs.
> 2. They could do so easily, if they wanted to.

Without ABI compatibility ISV application have to continuously play 
catchup which is far from easy and there is no incentive for them to do 
so. Even not considering ISV applications, ABI compatibility can still 
result in breakage. This happens quite often for GPL kernel modules not 
merged upstream for example.

We were talking about whether RHEL plays a different role from Fedora 
and whether there are significant technical differences in between them. 
I have given examples of the differences and the impact on the roles 
they play.

Rahul