Timeline for Is there a policy on dangerous answers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 25, 2011 at 10:03 | vote | accept | J0HN | ||
| Aug 18, 2011 at 11:30 | comment | added | Pekka | @Tom yeah man. Next thing, they'll come to people's houses! | |
| Aug 18, 2011 at 9:32 | comment | added | Tom Jones | I find this opinion to be most peculiar. The mentality here at SO-etc, is like that of a control-freak nanny state. Next you'll be scanning answers for keywords such as delete, rm -Rf, format. Get a life guys! | |
| Aug 18, 2011 at 8:52 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | @Robert: "It's about your own personal choices as to whether or not you aid and abet them if thy choose to do so" Yes, it is... on SO. On Meta we're having a discussion about why. :) | |
| Aug 17, 2011 at 10:40 | comment | added | Rob Moir | @Joachim +1 for that comment because I see what you mean, but I was thinking that the changes should be backported to (within reason) older versions too, and that hopefully its easy to configure this behaviour if I can't upgrade older boxen and inconsistency worries me more than the other factors. | |
| Aug 17, 2011 at 10:36 | comment | added | Joachim Sauer |
@Robert: according to that reasoning you must never change the behaviour of any command, even if its considered a bug, because then it would be "unpredictable" if the bug occurs or not. In this case I'm fairly in the camp that votes for the change: there is absolutely no real and relevant use case for doing rm -rf /.
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| Aug 17, 2011 at 10:33 | comment | added | Rob Moir | @Joachim - so that makes the behaviour of a potentially dangerous command unpredictable depending on what Unix/Linux variant and patch level you're sitting in front of. Who the hell thought that introducing unpredictable behaviour was a good idea. | |
| Aug 17, 2011 at 10:32 | comment | added | Rob Moir | @tomalak - it isn't about 'letting' others make mistakes. It's about your own personal choices as to whether or not you aid and abet them if thy choose to do so. | |
| Aug 17, 2011 at 9:56 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | @Eat: Understandable. | |
| Aug 17, 2011 at 8:16 | comment | added | Joachim Sauer |
completely unrelated side-note: the specific command rm -rf / is completely safe on a reasonably up-to-date Linux, because rm special-cases the root /. Now that should give the "don't post dangerous stuff" group something to talk about ;-)
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| Aug 17, 2011 at 8:03 | comment | added | Pekka |
@Tomalak I don't mind if others see fit to provide the code for a purpose I think is extremely stupid or dangerous (unless it's something really destructive, rm -rf / style), but I usually won't do it myself. You make fair points in your answer, but the question in its first incarnation had no notion of a specific phpMyAdmin-like use case. It looked more like "I want to be able to send full queries because properly parsing them is hard, and I'm the only person who will ever use this." And that is an argument for introducing a security hole that I can't support - from painful experience
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| Aug 17, 2011 at 6:41 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | So you won't let anybody make mistakes? And learn from them? | |
| Aug 16, 2011 at 9:18 | comment | added | user159834 | I think "Don't post code you wouldn't use" is kind of a Golden Rule in any case. | |
| Aug 16, 2011 at 9:00 | history | answered | Pekka | CC BY-SA 3.0 |