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Transition the default sudo group from sudo to wheel
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Description

In solus historically we've used the sudo group instead of wheel as the default admin group, for the historical reasons why, I don't know. Regardless, most software assumes that the wheel group is the default sudo group and we have to patch several packages to change it to use sudo. I am sure some functionality gets broken as we don't necessarily notice all of the packages that assume wheel.

wheel n. [from slang big wheel' for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (See wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root belong) is wheel'. Some vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of group `wheel' can go root.

To resolve:

  • Transition to new go-based qol-assist (R3820:b96412101e5477093c5dcd6d93fa599550ddbd11)
  • Implement support in qol-assist to remove users from a group. https://github.com/getsolus/qol-assist/issues/3 (https://github.com/getsolus/qol-assist/pull/4)
  • Add a migration in qol-assist that adds active admin users to the wheel group
  • Change the default sudo group to wheel in the sudo package
  • Change the default admin group from sudo to wheel in the accountsservice package
  • Remove our polkit patches that changes the sudo group from wheel to sudo
  • Remove systemd patches that changes the sudo group from wheel to sudo
  • Any other packages (hplip)
  • Add a migration in qol-assist that removes active admin users from the sudo group when we are confident it can be removed.

Event Timeline

joebonrichie created this task.

The qol-assist work can be considered up for grabs as I don't know when or who will have time for it.

ermo changed the task status from Open to In Progress.May 4 2023, 9:40 PM
ermo assigned this task to joebonrichie.
ermo updated the task description. (Show Details)
ermo updated the task description. (Show Details)
ermo updated the task description. (Show Details)