tailor1@???:
> Posted in the wrong mailing list.
>
> Please see this feature request in the Tails repository > Local storage
> devices displayed- Tails DVD no admin
> (https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/9554) where intrigeri suggested
> raising this issue on the mailing list.
>
> The basic premise being that hiding the internal drives in working in
> what I call "safe mode" (booting with no admin privileges) to be more
> consistent with Tails goals and objectives of consistensy than it is to
> show them.
>
> Since without root login, access to them is denied it is pointless to
> show them in the file manager and in the Disk Utility. In response to my
> suggestion intrigeri rephrases it in his own words as:
>
> "I can see your consistency point, that I would rephrase in my own words
> as "one should not even see what they won't be able to access anyway";
> when I zoom in on it, it totally makes sense to me -- thanks for
> clarifying."
>
> Not having any experience in coding myself, I am calling any interested
> parties who feel this to be a worthwile and valuable endeavour to please
> take it on and to implement and maintain this feature.
Sorry for the delay and I'm a bit tired today so my answer might not
take everything that has been said already into account.
It's not clear to me whether it is best to go for "consistency" (not
display something that you can't interact with) or "learnability"
(enable the user to learn that they can't access internal disks without
setting a password first) with the arguments presented so far. I'm using
"learnability" [1] here instead of "discoverability" [2] as intrigeri
did because I think it's slightly more accurate in this context.
It's not clear to me because neither of these arguments convince me fully:
- "consistency" could also be understood as "display hard disks as
any other Linux or live system would do" (at least to advanced
users). Maybe Nautilus and Disk Utility could be differentiated
here. Nautilus could hide internal disks by default and Disk
Utility show them (Disk Utility is more "technical", less "on the
way", maybe more for advanced users).
- "learnability" is good in theory but in practice here you're being
asked for a password which doesn't exist. You're asked a question
that has no possible answer. And you need to go find in the
the documentation the relevant section to understand what this
weird behavior is about. So I think it's currently broken.
In the end I think that an important underlying problem here is that we
shouldn't ask for a password that doesn't exist. And this is true for
accessing internal disks as well as any other feature that requires
administration privileges, like installing packages, opening a root
terminal, etc. All stuff that is obvious for Linux users but maybe not
for others.
So, if instead of displaying a password prompt, we could display a
message explaining that this feature is not available unless you set up
an administration password when starting Tails (and this for security
reasons), then I would be in favor of "learnability" and not
"consistency". This would:
- Allow learnability for real
- Fix this problem for all administration tasks
- Match the mental model of advanced users
Does this make sense?
--
sajolida
