change permissions to copy pictures into backgrounds

[Gilles Gravier]

Hi!

On 09/05/2012 11:55, Thomas Blasejewicz wrote:
>
> (2012/05/09 15:11), Patrick Asselman wrote:
>> It's always good to ask questions :-)
>>
>> Part of the answer probably lies in the background of Linux. It is
>> designed as a multi-user system. That is why security of files is
>> always used. Think of a system with 50 users, and 3 of those area
>> allowed to change system settings. You don't want all of those users
>> changing pictures in a shared directory. This is where the ownership
>> of files comes in, and users and user-groups.
>
> THANK YOU!!!
> Now, THAT explains a lot and makes it easy to accept, that I cannot do
> here what I originally wanted to do.

Imagine that one of those 50 users decides they want a porn wallpaper
and puts it in the system folder. Now imagine that out of those 50
users, say 20 or so are very young kids, and that each of them wants to
put a nice and friendly wallpaper on their own home screen and start
browsing the list of available system wallpapers. Imagine explaining
that to a judge afterwards.

No. You don't really want that. You want only responsible (in the sense
of responsible of managing the machine, and making judgement calls as to
what is appropriate to share) to be able to do things that impact all
other users. And you want these actions to be accounted for (logged).

Hence the permissions issue. Not an issue. A design feature for system
security and integrity.

Gilles.