[maemo-developers] MADDE 'developer' account - good or bad?

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 12:35, Ville M. Vainio <vivainio at gmail.com> wrote:
> As many of you go, Nokia Qt SDK uses, through MADDE, a special
> 'developer' account (with it's own home directory) to do stuff on the
> device

Indeed.

> That means that it doesn't use the information (databases etc.) stored
> in the users home directory. I'm gradually starting to feel this is a
> bad idea, that leads to subtle problems when developers are trying to
> pretend that they are running their application as default user (and
> hence have direct access to all the data user has).

In my limited (to date) experimentation, I certainly found it more
painful than using `user' for a number of reasons (not least
surprise).

Yes, it might give me more protection - but the point of running
something on the device is to give a direct test of what the runtime
environment will be. It can't be that if it's not running as `user'.
In the worst (facetious ;-)) case, I could think that that exec("rm
-rf $HOME") was really not that bad an idea, and ship my app off to
Extras-testing...

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council chair