On 10/31/2013 09:39 AM, Simo Sorce wrote:
I think a good server experience will require that yum install firefox on a headless system installs all required packages to make it work, is this something we need to take care of going forward ?
So stepping back, the use-case being proposed here is:
'Users of Fedora server will be able to install - at their option - software with graphical interfaces, and they will be able to successfully use these graphical interfaces via trusted X-forwarding (ssh -Y).'
I think that this doesn't work for the particular example you gave is a bug; maybe there's a problem with the package.
From my perspective though, the use case is a good one, particularly if
we're trying to make our server accessible to Microsofty admin types with minimal Linux experience. To use myself as an example: I suck as a sysadmin, but I have needed this in the past (particularly to use system-config-firewall on a remote system because I suck at editing iptables config by hand!)
The only concern that the more technical folks like you could address here - there are security implications on installing the whole set of stacks/libraries necessary to get a GUI app running on a server, right? If so,
(1) Do we care, or is it the user opting in to this that needs to take responsibiltiy.
(2) Do we have any kind of mechanism we can use to help account for the potential damage? (E.g, just a stupid random idea, but, if the user is just going in for a one-time / infrequent iptables config, have the GUI stuff set an expiration date at which time it gets removed to lessen the risk of having it installed?)
~m