sabayon-apply hosed my system due to inadequate documentation

[Scott Severance]

Binary package hint: sabayon

The man page for sabayon-apply is woefully inadequate. In trying to apply a profile to a newly-created user, I ran sabayon-apply as root to gain write access to the user's $HOME (in my case, file ownership wasn't an issue). I issued the following commands:

cd ~newuser
sudo sabayon-apply profile_name

Imagine my horror when sabayon-apply applied the profile (which turned out to be broken) to root, NOT newuser! Thus, my system is now hosed as I've been unable to figure what got changed; all I know is that now apps like the Users Settings app complains, "You are not allowed to modify the system configuration."

Command line programs nearly always operate either on whatever is specified on the command line or on the current directory. The documentation for sabayon-apply makes no mention about how to select which user it should operate on (which is already a gross omission). So, the only logical guess is that it must copy the files to the current directory. No reasonable user would expect it to operate on the current user when the working directory is another user's home directory.

Please, if you do something weird--especially if it has the potential to be destructive--document it!

[Scott Balneaves (sbalneav)]

sabayon-apply is run as the user itself, so running sabayon-apply as sudo would, of course, apply the profile to root.

sabayon-apply doesn't do anything wierd, it just didn't do what you expected it to do. I'll look at fleshing out the manpage a bit more upstream.

[Scott Severance (scott.severance)]

Perhaps I should have said "highly unusual" instead of "weird." At any rate, I can't recall using a program before that works as sabayon-apply does. I'm not questioning whether sabayon-apply's behavior is reasonable, but I do think that this bug deserves an importance setting higher than wishlist, considering the potential for damage.

[Jordan Erickson (lns)]

> No reasonable user would expect it to operate on the current
> user when the working directory is another user's home directory.

I respectfully disagree. Running a command designed to apply user
configurations as the root user would presumably run it on the root user
- especially since that's what the command was designed to do. If you're
weary, look at the code you're running before you run it as root! Very
important to know *exactly* what you're running as root.

[Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and trying to help make Ubuntu better. However, this package is no longer part of Ubuntu repositories. Because of this the Ubuntu project can not support or fix your particular bug. Please report this bug to the provider of the software package. Thanks!

If you are interested in learning more about software repositories and Ubuntu, check https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories