Re: [gentoo-dev] suggestion: virtual/telnet

[Christian Birchinger]

I'm the last person who would want infos and help on emerge
removed but that sounds like too much baby sitting.
I like Gentoo for not enabling the server daemon by default
after emerge. That's the "protection" i expect and like.
But i dislike when my distribution tries to be smarter than
the user. If you want to warn the user then a ewarn after
emerge has to be enough becauee everything else annoys too
much.

And telnet isn't bad by default. I use the client for various
tests and have it installed on all my machines because sometimes
it's just simpler than netcat magic etc.

On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 09:55:02PM -0500, Allen Parker wrote:
> I must pipe up on this one. When a user asks for "telnet" they're usually
> not aware of the security risks involved. (kinda makes me wonder why it's
> installed by default on Debian :-\) Probably the best way to handle this is
> to create a virtual/telnet and add a default package that when uninstalled
> displays a basic readme saying telnet isn't secure and why, asks the user if
> they still want to do it, and THEN after they've confirmed that they do in
> fact want telnet, allow them to emerge whichever telnet they choose.
>
> So, to re-state because I'm not even sure what I said up there:
> Create package block-telnet that does as it's name implies, blocks the
> virtual/telnet package so that no other telnetd/telnet client may be emerged
> without removing it first.
> Setup block-telnet to install something like /usr/share/doc/telnet-readme
> (the contents of the same thing you read when you remove block-telnet) and
> upon unmerge fire off a simple shell script that less's the same file
> (hidden) that is telnet-readme with a yes/no choice saying are you sure you
> wish to remove me?
> Add block-telnet -> virtual/telnet as a virtual/telnet blocker by default
> for all arch/stage/devel profiles under system instead of world and make it
> a default package (like nano) for Gentoo 2004.
>
> It honestly seems to me that this would probably take any dev minutes to set
> the virtual up this way and it would also allow very fast, short answers in
> regards to getting questions on telnet:
>
> Eg:
> User: how do I install telnet?
> Dev: emerge unmerge block-telnet ... and read what it says.
> User: thanks for your help!
>
> That's my 2/100ths of a monetary unit.
> Allen Parker
>
> PS: when used in this manner, it's hardly cruft.

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