Comment 21 for bug 174283

> These users are probably moving over from Windows anyway, and already have that deep-seeded hatred of warning dialog boxes, so even just this one probably isn't going to help them.

So instead of asking the user if they really want to delete their entire filesystem... we should just assume that's what they really meant and do it without asking? I'm not sure how you think this an improvement.

> The point is that the intended effect of this change won't happen, as the method is already proven ineffective

Shouldn't synonyms like "sudo rm -fr ../../*" in the home directory be prevented, too? It should be based on the actual effect the command has, not a particular string. If not, I would think that's a bug.

> and there are literally thousands of other possible command sequences that can hose a system in the same way, and having confirmation for them all just makes easy

There's protecting the user against pasting malicious commands, and there's protecting the user from the results of an unfortunate typo. Even experienced users make stupid mistakes like this (http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html), which is why "preserve root" is the default behavior in GNU rm:

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Treating-_002f-specially.html

If "the *nix philosophy" means "the user deserves to lose their life's work over a simple mistake", then I don't see any value in keeping that particular "philosophy" alive.

Maybe you'd be happier with something like Arch Linux?