Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

On Monday, November 12, 2001, at 03:54 PM, Nils Pedersen wrote:
> Adam Elman wrote:
> > 2) Given that users don't fit nicely into these categories, it's
> > impossible to fit preferences into these categories anyway, especially
> > with 3 levels -- with 2, it's a bit easier.  I know there has been much
> > confusion in the past about what preferences should be in
> > "Intermediate" -- that's because the division is arbitrary.
>
> well this might be off track a bit...
>
> But we still have two levels, root and user.
>
> Yes - I think that hard coded levels probably aren't that useful. Where 
> it
> does become more interesting is if you can control the presentation of a
> set of functionality based on whatever policy an administrator may 
> have...

I think that security issues wrt functionality and settings are indeed 
totally separate from the user levels we're talking about (as used in 
Nautilus) and should be treated and handled differently.  That said, I 
agree completely with what you're saying, and I think that's an area we 
need to address.

MacOS X has an interesting approach to this: a little lock icon is 
showed on any dialog which requires admin access.  If you want to change 
settings, you first have to click the lock icon and enter the root 
password; it then enables the controls.  I think it's somehow using sudo 
underneath, but I'm not sure.

This might or might not be the right approach.  I do know that when I 
was hanging out in the GNOME booth at LWE, this came up with at least 
two people: one who was interested in GNOME on Solaris for military use, 
and another (from the Linux Terminal Server Project) who was interested 
in being able to lock down certain GNOME settings for student users in a 
classroom lab setting.  So this is a big issue for GNOME deployment in 
several interesting situations.

Adam