Gosh diddly darn it I deleted a file, You should have the common sense to use a computer wisely not have to be bugged at every turn with an “are you sure?”

How about next time you cross the road imagine a little hologram “Are you sure?” And as you motion yes towards it realize you just wasted a moment of your life that if people hadn’t ruined it by not thinking for themselves and creating this mothered culture of life for everything everywhere that you could already be on your way, Step up and learn what dangers there are out there and if you fall victim to a mistake learn from it, We all should.

Maybe you could even write a bug report and get your change reverted before it sticks.

But anyway, Enjoy your life if you still can..

The attraction of Linux to many people (myself included) is that it offers complete control over their computers – something that Microsoft and Apple have gradually taken away (supposedly for the users’ own protection).

If you need to be told that rm -rf / will delete EVERYTHING in the root, you should stick to the GUI – or at the very least, not use the sudo command unless you know what you’re doing.

Linux’s power is that it does what you tell it to and if you tell it to do something profoundly stupid, it will do just that.

No, you issued the command, you used the -f flag and insisted that the computer comply… therefore you, not Ubuntu, wiped root. If you order your kids to dive off the roof are you going to ground them for it? Or worse, sue the contractor that built your house for not installing a safety system that would prevent them from having done so? God forbid the devs listen to you and ruin *nix for the rest of us.

issue:
#echo /dev/zero > /dev/sda1
and guess what? it erases mbr in under 2 ms.

solution:

add –preserve-all-things-i-forgot-contemplate to echo

either that, or i am going to switch over to osx, which is a more secure OS.

lulz

At the time you filed your bugreport, Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 (the ones you refer to) were shipping an outdated version of coreutils (5.93). –preserve-root was made the default in coreutils-6.3, which had been released for about a year at that time. But instead of simply requesting an update of the Ubuntu coreutils package, you blindly assumed that Ubuntu was responsible for “fixing” what you felt was an Ubuntu bug (you seem to be under the common misconception that Ubuntu is equvalent to GNU/Linux/FOSS, and hence is the correct place to complain and file bug reports for something Ubuntu doesn’t or shouldn’t lay it’s hands on in the first place).

In a different blog post you argue that other distributions like Arch Linux did already “fix” this bug — they didn’t, they simply shipped a current version of coreutils, trusting that users who wouldn’t like this change would voice their concerns at the right place (i.e. the coreutils developers). Unlike Ubuntu there are distributions who only do what a distribution should be doing — distribute software, vanilla and as intended by the upstream authors, without patching and “fixing” it to death in order to protect their “innocent” (i.e. uneducated) users.

So, next time you’re “amazed and bewildered”, try to investigate the issue before making blind assumptions and rushing to the wrong place to complain.