Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT
If you've dabbled even a little bit with security matters, you know that giving root rights or the root password to a common user is a bad idea. But what do you do if a user has a valid need to do something that absolutely requires root rights? The answer is simple: use sudo to grant the user the needed permissions without letting him have the root password, and limit access to a minimum.


Source...

There are very few things that require root privileges, you might be better off with wheel groups and sudo to become non-root users. Such as a script that became the SVN user and t hen deployed a SVN repository or what have you rather than becoming root to do so.

Anything that you become root for and then root chowns stuff to another user is a good sign that it could be done without being root for example.