build-essential

[Scott James Remnant]

On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 10:08 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> <quote who="Matt Zimmerman">
> 
> > Removing the compiler only creates a marginal amount of extra work for an
> > attacker who will just upload or download their own binaries or find
> > another way around it, while the other 99.9% of people using the system
> > are needlessly inconvenienced.
> 
> The other 99.9% of people using the system... Are they all going to use GCC?
> 
99.9% of our "users" won't need vi, emacs, fetchmail, procmail, ttf-
malayalam-fonts, ttf-bangla-fonts, python-egenix-mxproxy, python-opengl,
reiser4progs, lvm10, lvm2, evms, dmidecode, strace, etc.

Desktop has never been about creating a system for "99.9% of our users",
but creating a sensible desktop for everybody.

Right now a compiler is an essential part of a Linux machine, as many
people are going to bitch about it being missing as much as those who'd
bitch about (e.g.) a web browser being missing.


The "systems without a compiler are more secure" argument is pretty
bullshit; both times I've been hacked in the past, examining the
hacker's history has revealed that they tend to use "apt-get" ... should
we not ship with that to increase security?

Put me down as +1 for putting build-essential into desktop.

Scott
-- 
~scott
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