[palata]

> [I want root,] The fact that I own my device is non-negotiable.

I read that a lot, and I agree that I want to own my device. But that does not mean that I should have root access on the OS I choose to install on it.

Owning my device means that I should be able to install whatever OS I want. It does not mean at all that OS developers must do whatever I tell you to do.

[kevincox]

Yes, that is why it is a deal breaker. I'll choose to run a different OS. I didn't say that GrapheneOS must support root. Just that I won't run it if they don't.

[palata]

And I'm fine with you wanting root on the device you own. But you were implying that not having root means that you don't own your device. I disagree with that. You can totally own your device and not be root.

I think it is important, because I read a lot of comments that imply that "owning their device" means "owning the developers". And that's a wrong fight.

The real fight is that it should be illegal to prevent me from installing my preferred OS on a general-purpose computer.

[kevincox]

Fair enough. Owning means having a choice. The unlockable bootloader enables that. But for me the choice of OS will be one that lets me access all files on the device should I need to.

[galangalalgol]

What should that support look like? Maybe have a userdebug build already built and available? I don't include a root account on hardened container images for some of the same reasons they cite. So including it for everyone and creating a way to activate it is suboptimal for people who don't want that trade off. A parallel build pipeline seems the most reasonable to me?

[kevincox]

Yeah, I would be fine with a different build stream. I do think it could be sufficiently secure in a single stream but it will always be increased attack surface so the safest option is to do separate builds.

I also don't include a root account in my container images, but you probably have a root account on the sever that runs them in case you need to debug something. But you can probably also build and deploy a new container. At the end of the day you almost always want some last-resort way to access the data stored in case something goes very wrong. Whether that is for backups, "hostile" data export or for other reasons it is important to me.

[galangalalgol]

I don't actually. Devs don't get root at my employer. Even on a vm. I have rootless podman, and can be root in a container. Even our gitlab instances don't have any privileged runners. So kaneko etc.