[vlc] privileged/vlc-wrapper/set-UID/trusted start failure messages

[Christophe Mutricy]

On Sat, Jun 25, 11 at 09:49 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
> Since multimedia packages and their deps get rebuilt almost daily,
> you're saying people running a single purpose Linux are supposed to
> compile VLC nearly every day they do updates and want to run it?
> Windows users don't have to do that!

Last time cersion of VLC (1.1.10) is 20 days old for both win and linux.
And with a decent OS you don't have to rebuild VLC when the libs get
rebuilt

And I'm saying people taking the non-standard choice of not having
normal users on their system should now there is consequences

> Your answer is all over the internet, and of no use to me. I don't
> clutter my systems with devel packages, only running precompiled
> software on them, and on the systems I build, and those I repair,
> and those I install software on. No one should have to recompile a
> program to run on Linux that can can be run in Windows without
> recompiling, particularly since on Linux root is god and can do
> absolutely anything (other than run VLC!). IOW, if root cannot run
> an application, something is very wrong.


Both the VLC developers and the maintainers of VLC in your distribution
seem to agree that it's safer to not allow VLC to be run as root by
default. There have been a large number of security in VLC. It's
particurarly prone to it having to demux a lot format coming to the wild
intenet.


Try running apache2 as root and see what happens
> 
> The error messages produced by trying to run as root are not self
> explanatory, and thus I asked here how to run as they imply can be
> done so that I can test to make sure an application is properly
> installed by running it first as root; or if an ordinary user cannot
> run it, test run it as root in order to ensure that the ordinary
> user is not impeded by his own user settings.

what is not explicit in "VLC is not supposed to be run as root".
I won't insult such an experience admin as you by telling how and where
you can find the help on vlc-wrapper
 
> video to a TV shouldn't need but one user. If VLC cannot let me do
> my job, I can't use VLC, or install it, or recommend it, for any OS.

Ouch we'll loose 0.00001% of our user base.

It's free software. Use it if you like it. If you don't fix it or go
away.

-- 
Xtophe