I see people talking about doas saying it’s just like sudo but with less features. I’m just wondering if there is any situation where you should use doas or if it’s just personal preference.
Does the user have that access? In my case with rpm-ostree they can just execute 2 commands rpm-ostree refresh-md (get updates) and rpm-ostree update. rpm-ostree rebase is used for system upgrades afaik, that one needs a password.
Only the root user has access to system updates on my system currently.
What does rpm-ostree update do exactly? Does it execute the update? Or is that the rebase command only?
No rpm-ostree downloads the diffs, applies existing changes (added or removed packages) and builds a new image that gets staged as first boot target. After reboot you are on an updated system.
If it builds a new image that replaces the entire system it could be compromised to give full access to the entire system just as easily as sudo, possibly more easily.
I see. I have little knowledge, but I bet that the “root privileges” part of this process is the reboot. Upon rebooting, system updates are applied from the new image via some privileged process.
That’s pretty neat. Unfortunately I haven’t ventured deeply enough into that type of system yet (was it called immutable distro or something?). I use gentoo, which doesn’t support this out of the box.
Thanks for showing me something new!
