Linux install instructions include hacky, somewhat insecure, and often uneeded udev rule which makes mcu world-programmable

[tim-seoss]

The Linux installation instructions include this sort of thing:

These rules let you use USB devices like the micro:bit without root privilege, i.e. sudo.

Create this file in /etc/udev/rules.d with the content shown below.

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/99-microbit.rules

• CMSIS-DAP for microbit
  SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0d28", ATTR{idProduct}=="0204", MODE:="666"

This is a bit hacky, unnecessary on many Linux distros (e.g. Debian out of the box doesn't need this step I think, since the ACM dev get group writeable by the plugdev group) and also opens a bit of a security hole. Although this is unlikely to be practically exploited, I think it should probably be fixed, since these sort of things have a habit of getting copy-pasted to things like embedded Linux systems, where they might end up doing some damage.

n.b. present on both master and rewrite branches

[adamgreig]

I totally agree we shouldn't suggest a mode of 666 here; probably we should set the uaccess tag and plugdev group instead.

However, are you sure it's not required? For one thing, it's not a CDC-ACM device; it's either HID or bulk USB for the CMSIS-DAP interface used to program the board; but even with CDC-ACM I've usually found there does need to be a udev rule if it doesn't already recognise the device. However there are a lot of extra rules hiding on most systems, for example on Ubuntu there's /lib/udev/rules.d/60-openocd.rules if you have openocd installed, which includes a rule for all CMSIS-DAP devices to put them in the plugdev group and apply the uaccess tag, along with rules for almost all other probes openocd knows about.