"Become Root" button in Terminal Activity kills anything running in current Terminal session

[greenfeld]

The "Become Root" button in the Terminal Activity kills anything running in the currently active Terminal session window.

I'm not so certain if this is a good idea or not. Since all it does is run "su -", why can't we let people run "su" manually?

A side effect is that if you exit the root shell prompt, the Terminal window closes. This is somewhat unexpected if you were trying to get back to the normal user of the terminal.

Reproduction:

1. Run something which runs until exited like "top", etc. in a Terminal session.
2. Press the "Become Root" button. Whatever was previously running from Step 1 has been killed off, and you will have a Bash root shell prompt {or hopefully asked for the password to one if so configured for your system}.

Seen with Terminal-31 in OLPC OS 11.2.0 os14.

[RafaelOrtiz]

Disabling the become root button in my clone, for reported problems (see #2597)

​http://git.sugarlabs.org/terminal/terminal-fixes/commit/52dbb055ec9f9e42da9c312b27b766481e178ba7

Merge request.

​http://git.sugarlabs.org/terminal/mainline/merge_requests/4

[greenfeld]

Also of note: If the system needs to asks for a password, receives an invalid one, or otherwise is denied su rights, the terminal session then ends. If there was only one session open, this also forces the activity to exit.

This might be a good security deterrent, but could be very confusing for users.

[manuq]

Become root functionality was removed in commit e1c0a89a947638fe2d31427b88501d1878194350 .